


Convivencia

by kitashvi



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! Series
Genre: AU, Ghost Boyfriend AU, M/M, Mild Gore, based on a plot bunny from @suturmon on tumblr, but just bruises and cuts and some blood not described too terribly in detail, he didn't ask for this mumbo-jumbo dead kid bullshit, mild body horror, more tags as needed, the practical and unethical use of magic, tkb just wants to go to college and pay his rent, unlikely roommates, well mild is subjective i suppose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-08-13 20:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7984330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitashvi/pseuds/kitashvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the record, when Marik tells Bakura he found him an apartment that was probably haunted, Bakura had figured he was <i>kidding</i>. </p>
<p>(Bakura moves into an apartment that is probably too good to be true and finds out, rather swiftly, that it is. Which is to say, Bakura discovers that <i>dying</i> doesn't exactly mean the previous tenant ever <i>moved out</i>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **finally getting around to posting our fic on here! this is a story a few years in the making (two or three) and based on a plot bunny by suturmon on tumblr which is more or less:**
> 
>  
> 
> AU where (thief) Bakura lives alone in a gross apartment with a gross past where a kid was killed and decapitated there. The ghost takes a liking to Bakura and reveals himself as Ryou. Sometimes Ryou takes his head off when he’s upset or mad at Bakura and just makes him uncomfortable. Bakura buys vanilla candles to appease him and the like. Ryou is intangible so Bakura often does things for Ryou like changes the channel, turns on music (ect.) Somewhere along the way, Bakura finds a way to make Ryou tangible for a brief time and during that time they kiss a lot and Ryou eats everything.
> 
>  
> 
> _there've been so many gaps in between writing this fic (hello, college) but we're finally up and running and barreling towards the end! as always, let us know how/if you like it, and if you do, go tell suturmon their AU is badass. also, for reference in our fics, **Yami Marik** is just **Marik** , and **Marik/Malik Ishtar** is **Malik**._
> 
>  
> 
> **ash** & _kit_

“The rent’s two-fifty a month. Two bedrooms, too, and most of the furniture’s still in there.”

Bakura chomps on the pen in his mouth, feels the plastic crack under his teeth and smells ink, sharp and acidic. He’d just scrubbed the ink stains from his teeth from the last time. “ _Two_ -fifty? For all that?” The finger he skims across his teeth comes away blue. “What’s the catch?”

Marik snorts and it echoes across the line. “Some kid was murdered there.”

“No, really?” He tosses the pen at the trashcan—it hits the rim, bounces off and rolls under the coffee shop counter, bleeding ink everywhere. Bakura can feel the barista’s glare on the back of his neck.

“No,” Marik says, rustling something on his end, “ _really_. Some kid got his head chopped off by some crazy axe murderer or some shit like that.” After a pronounced pause, he adds, “And there’s no heat. And the appliances are all ancient.” The asshole is smirking on the other end, Bakura _knows it._ “And there might be rats.”

Bakura balls up his coffee cup and makes it into the trashcan this time, shouldering his way out of the shop. “You could have just led with that, Marik, instead of making up stupid ghost stories.” There’s a long silence where he pretends like he has things like standards and Marik waits patiently for him to cave. “I need a place. I’ll take it.”

“I’m not making—” Marik sighs, “look, whatever, the sooner you’re out of my room, the better. I’ll let the landlord know.” Bakura steps down into the subway and smushes his phone to his ear to hear Marik ask, “Want Rishid to help you move your stuff?”

He jumps the turnstile. “Nah, it’s okay. You and Malik are enough.”

“Who said I’m volunteering?”

“Whatever,” Bakura skids into the train by the skin of his nose, jostling other passengers and ignoring their disgruntled muttering with practice ease, “you’ll help. You love me.”

There’s a brief, awkward pause before Marik huffs into the phone. “Fine, fine. See you tomorrow.”

-

Bakura drops his duffel bag and a cloud of dust rushes up to meet him. Marik and Malik out from behind him, one chin on either of his shoulders. “Damnit, Marik, this place is a sty.”

Malik hisses something to his twin and something twists in Bakura’s gut—he remembers only bits and pieces of the language his mother taught him, not enough to understand but just enough for it to sting. He kicks the doorjamb instead of turning and wringing Malik’s neck out of misplaced rage. Part of the wood cracks under his boot. Malik speaks again, this time in Japanese. “Are you seriously going to live here?”

Bakura wanders into the living room, peers into the rest of the apartment. The dust is making his eyes water, and he scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess? I mean, I can’t keep mooching off you guys.”

Malik elbows his brother in the ribs, hard, before he can open his mouth. “Marik’s an ass. You could stay with us longer. Ishizu loves you.” Malik has to dig his fingers into the sill before the grimy balcony opens with a groan—the floating dust motes glow in the sudden light. He turns on his heel to jab a finger at Bakura. “And I mean that in a purely platonic, little-brother sort of way. If you sleep with my sister, I’ll punch out your teeth.”

“I’ll eviscerate you,” Marik pipes up from the doorway.

Bakura and Malik exchange looks. “I’m concerned for him, Malik.”

Marik goes to lean against the wall and thinks better of it. “Please. I’m not the one who’s renting an apartment someone was brutally murdered in.”

“Shut up with that shit, okay?” Bakura scowls at Marik as he picks his way into the hallway, opening doors to find a closet, a bathroom, a bedroom. The furthest door on the right sticks for a moment and Bakura puts his weight into it. “It wasn’t funny the first time.” The door to the bedroom creaks as it opens. “Oh fuck—”

Malik peers over his shoulder, Marik trailing behind them. “What?”

Marik sees what his friend is staring at before his twin does. Bakura would punch the shit-eating grin off his face if he didn’t want to vomit instead. “Who’s making shit up now?”

The wooden floor of the bedroom is _gouged_ , there’s no other word for it. Chunks of the floor are gouged out, the planks stained a grungy copper. There were only a bed and a bookshelf, and they’re both smashed to pieces and strewn across the room. Malik runs a hand over one of the dents in the walls, then wipes the plaster dust off on his jeans. The window frame must’ve been glued back together with gum and prayers, and—“Are those _claw_ marks?” Bakura rubs a hand over his face. “From someone’s _nails_?” He can taste bile in the back of his throat and his brain helpfully supplies a running reel of what must have happened here.

Ever deadpan, Marik shrugs. “I told you so.”

“Marik!” His brother snaps at him. He eyes Bakura, who’s standing over the mutilated floor, shell-shocked. “I think you broke him.” Malik rests his hand on Bakura’s shoulder. “Hey, come on. We can find a different place.”

Bakura comes back to himself and flinches under Malik’s hand. Shaking his head, he runs a hand through his hair. “No. No, it’s fine. It’s cheap. I just—let me borrow your phone?” He flaps a hand awkwardly around the room and resists the urge to run the ever-loving hell away. “I want to take photos of the damage, in case the landlord thinks I added on to the damage or something.”

The twins have a hushed conversation near the bedroom door while Bakura snaps photos of the window frame and the floor and the walls, trying his damndest to ignore them. He’s zooming in on a stain that looks suspiciously like blood when he backspaces into the previous picture and can’t figure his way back to the main screen like some sort of octogenarian. “Malik, come here, I can’t figure out your phone. You smug assholes, it’s like a goddamn satellite— _whoa_.” Bakura waves them over. “What the hell—?”

Malik slings an arm around Bakura’s waist as he shows them the screen. “Right there, by the window. Is that glare?” Twin dots of light float on the wall next to the window, blurring the background around them. Bakura flips through the rest of the photos. “Look, it’s in all of them.”

“No, I don’t think it’s glare.” Malik’s skinny finger pokes at the screen. “It’s not close enough to the window to be.” He leans closer, his earrings brushing Bakura’s shoulder. “They look like _eyes_ —that’s creepy!”

Bakura nearly drops the phone and Malik yelps, high and sharp, as Marik gooses them both. He ducks away from flailing fists and bolts from the room, yowling, “It’s the _ghost_! He’s coming to _kill_ you!”

Rubbing his sides, Bakura glares after him and hands Malik back his phone. “He’s got some serious issues, you know that, right?”

Malik shrugs. “He grew up in a box, practically.”

“You grew up in a box, too. You turned out alright.”

Malik snorts. “Thanks.” Expression softening, he glances around. “You sure you’ll be alright in here? You _can_ still stay with us.”

They walk to the door and Bakura waves him off. “Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s close to work, and it’s really cheap. I’ll be fine. See you in classes tomorrow?”

Malik rolls his eyes and gives the apartment another glance. “Okay. Just, don’t sleep in that fucked-up room, please? Promise?”

“Yeah, yeah, Mom. Sure thing.” Bakura closes the door on Malik’s snide reply, but he’s grinning. “Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

He’s crawling into his sleeping bag—the whole house is under an inch of dust, he’ll deal with it tomorrow—when a floorboard creaks in the other bedroom. Bakura stares at the ceiling and tries not to have a heart attack. “Rats, right? Marik said there are rats.”

He doesn’t sleep the rest of the night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **yes hi have like ten chapters all at once**

Bakura can feel eyes on the back of his neck long before twin shadows fall over his computer screen. He looks up from his laptop. “How do you two keep finding me?”

Marik slumps into the chair next to him and puts his feet up on Bakura’s lap. “Where else do we find a biology major but in the biology labs?”

“Shut up.” Bakura clicks open the web browser with a surreptitious look over his shoulder. “Just because you copped out with an Egyptology major doesn’t mean you get to make fun of me.” He types his new address into the search engine and braces himself. For what he finds or the shitfit Malik’s about to throw, he’s not entirely sure.

Four pages of information load, and Bakura clicks on the first link, a news article from fifteen years ago: “Gruesome Murder Shocks Community, Shatters Family.” It’s more than a little unsettling to see pictures of his own apartment covered in police tape and lit up with flash.

_“Members of the community will be sure to lock their windows and doors tonight,”_ Malik reads over his shoulder, _“as more information of the horrific murder of a neighborhood teen in his own home is being released to the public. Ryou, 16, was beaten and beheaded in his home late Wednesday evening, while his parents and twin brother left to pick up a relative at the airport. Authorities are reviewing apartment security recordings and tapes from a nearby traffic camera. They believe the murderer entered the home through the balcony, then cornered and decapitated Ryou in the bedroom he shared with his brother.”_

Marik whistles through his teeth. “Wow.” He pulls his feet from Bakura’s lap and leans closer. “Is there any particular reason you’ve decided to forgo what little sleep you already get by looking this up?”

“Shut up.” Bakura clicks the next article, a short blurb published two months after the first. _“There are still no suspects in the murder, and Ryou’s family and the community are rallying to keep the police from closing the case and moving on. A candlelight vigil will be held outside the apartment building this Friday night at 6 in the evening.”_ He closes the browser and turns the computer off. Shakes his head. Considers, not for the first time, moving back.

“That’s it.” Like he can read minds, Malik plants his hands on Bakura’s shoulders and spins him around. “You can’t live there. Pack your shit, you’re moving back.”

Bakura throws his hands up and bats Malik away. “It’s just an article! From fifteen years ago! It’s not like the axe murderer’s fucking coming _back_.”

“No one’s lived there since the family bailed. They ditched _everything_ , Bakura, didn’t you notice? All their furniture, all the appliances—they just wanted to get the hell out of there, and you should, too!”

“Maybe the murderer hasn’t come back because no one’s lived there,” Marik tosses in, looking entirely too amused than can be good for Bakura’s help. “Now that someone’s moved in, you should probably lock your balcony up tight.”

Malik swats at his brother. “Not helping. Shut up. I don’t even want to know how you _found_ that place.” He whirls back on Bakura. “So, you’re seriously going to stay in the haunted mansion?”

Bakura pretends to be very focused on the ceiling tiles and wisely says nothing. Like his sister, Malik is not above smacking people to make a point.

Malik heaves a deep, exasperated sigh. “Okay, look, I know you don’t like this sort of thing, but it’s just not a good place for you to be. It’s just all kind of bad luck and bad energy. It won’t end well.”

Sitting so close next to him, if Marik notice him bristle, he doesn’t say anything. “Hey, you’re the ones who grew up with all that, not me. I don’t believe it.” He stands and shoulders his backpack. “I gotta go, before I miss the last bus. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Marik stands with him. “I can give you a ride on the bike. Ishizu wants groceries and it’s my turn.” He waves goodbye to his brother and whisks Bakura away before he can protest, but waits until they’re in the parking lot to add, “You’re still one of us.” 

Bakura whips back around, but Marik keeps speaking, “You can act like you’re not, and you can pretend that your mom marrying some outsider kicks you out of the super-special club, but you’re the only one that thinks that. I don’t, Rishid doesn’t, and Malik and Ishizu sure as hell don’t.” He straddles the bike and hands Bakura a helmet—Marik never rides with one, but Bakura knows better than to point that out—and the conversation is clearly over.

-

“Were you at my house?”

Malik presses his phone to his ear, flapping a hand at Marik to shut him up. “What? No.” He pulled an apple out of the fridge. “Ishizu stopped by earlier, she brought you a cactus.”

On the other end of the phone, Bakura rustles some papers. “Yeah, I saw that. Thank her for me?” He mumbles something to himself, then, “Did she touch my books, though?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

Bakura huffs on the other end. “Some of them just…aren’t where I left them? Like, my Sandman comic books? I swear I left them on the counter, and now they’re on the coffee table. And my stereo was on when I got home from class.”

Marik squeezes his brother’s shoulder as he walks by, and Malik smiles. “Maybe it’s the—”

“I swear to God, if you say ghost I’m going to punch you.”

He catches the mug of tea Marik slides across the kitchen island. “Touchy, aren’t we?”

Marik looks up at the clock. “Doesn’t he have work?”

Malik frowns. “Hey, yeah. Don’t you have work?”

Bakura trips over his own feet on the other end. “What? Fuck! I gotta—I’m so late—I’ll talk to you later, okay? Okay!” The line goes dead.

“Bakura’s got the social skills of a toddler,” Marik comments, drinking his own scalding tea. “He’s doing alright?”

Tracing slim fingers around the rim of his cup, Malik snorts. “Yeah, lover-boy, he’s fine.”

It takes a moment for him to realize a witty retort is not forthcoming, and Malik snaps his head up. Marik is leaning against the counter, muscles coiled with tension, staring into his tea. His knuckles are white. “Sorry.”

His brother sucks in a deep breath, and the chill bleeds from the set of his shoulders. He grins at his brother and sets his tea down. “Don’t worry about it.” Marik wipes his hands on his sweatpants, clears his throat. “I’m going for a run.”

Marik brushes past Rishid on his way out the door, and their older brother knows what’s up immediately. He fixes Malik a scathing look. “Why do you do that?”

“It was an accident this time.” Rishid arches an eyebrow. “I swear! I didn’t know that was going to set him off!” Malik shoves his own tea away. “It’s been years, Rishid, this is so stupid.” _I’m tired of walking on landmines._ “He’s not getting any better, Rishid.”

“You have yours,” Rishid retorts, “Marik has his. A lot of them, and that takes time.” Rishid’s tone brooks no argument. “Leave it alone.”

Malik scowls. “Sure.”

“Or I’ll tell Ishizu.”

“Okay, damnit!”

-

The glass knocks into his head where he’s resting it on the bar top, and Bakura groans more out of expectation than pain. His boss follows it up with a damp dishrag, and he shoots upright. “Rise and shine, lazybones! It’s time to go home. I’ll clear up the rest myself.”

It’s only water in the glass, and Bakura scowls, rubbing his face with his palms. His ears are still ringing from hours of music on the overhead speakers. “What time is it?”

“Four in the morning.” She’s shuffling through the till, and she levels a motherly eye on him. “When do you get any sleep?”

He clambers off the bar stool and stretches. “I only have class from noon to five, so I sleep before and after work. It all works out.”

“You eating?”

“No, I subsist on bleak rays of sunshine and the smell of freshly-printed chemistry worksheets.” Mai wields another dishrag and Bakura backpedals, “Yes, yes, I eat! Fuck, Mai, I’m a big boy.”

Mai nods, and slides a bottle of whiskey across the bar. “Last bottle, it’s not selling too well. You might as well have it, I’m not ordering anymore.” Outside the door, a car honks, and Mai jerks her thumb at the exit. Bakura is caught between uncomfortable and grateful that she has his back. “Called you a cab, on me. Get home, kid.”

-

His stereo is on again when he gets home, set to a classical music station Bakura hadn’t even known existed, let alone selected for himself. Bakura turns if off with a thump. It’s an ancient piece of shit, but he’s dragged it from place to place and is loathe to give it up, apparent sudden sentience notwithstanding.. “I hope you aren’t breaking.”

Like an answer, something skitters across the floor near the balcony and Bakura whirls around on his heel. The curtains don’t even flutter. “Marik? Not funny!” Bakura drops his stuff on the kitchen table and when nothing else moves, he wonders how often he should water the cactus.

His stereo flips on again. Bakura jerks his head up from the cactus, and this time, the light from the balcony illuminates something translucent standing in front of the stereo.

There is someone in his house.

Bakura grabs for the kitchen chair and the person turns, caught by surprise and becoming more and more visible. How did Bakura miss someone _standing in the middle of his house_? “What the _fu_ —” Bakura sets down the chair, slowly. “Get out!”

His unexpected houseguest cocks his head to the side, and looks at Bakura likes he’s something particularly unpleasant on the bottom of a shoe. He runs his hand through pale bangs. “Rude.”

“I’m not the one who broke into someone else’s _house_!” Bakura snaps, reconsidering the chair up Ishizu’s dinky cactus instead. “I’m serious! I’ll throw this!” He lifts it over his head. “It’ll hurt!”

The kid doesn’t move. Bakura throws the cactus, watching it sail—

— _through_ him, shattering against the wall behind him.

Bakura sits down on the chair, hard. “Holy _shit_.” If he survives this, he and Marik are going to have a _chat_.

“That’s nothing special. Watch this!” The kid grins, and pops his head right off his neck.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _it's so weird seeing our writing from 2-3 years ago, man, and we went back and did some clean-up and editing, but there's no rewriting the past, yeah? it's cool to see the progression of our style, though_

Bakura doesn’t exactly remember sitting down, but pressing his palms to his temples and taking deep breaths seems to be helping.

“Okay,” Bakura puts his head between his knees, “there’s a ghost. In my house.” From this angle, he can see the ghost’s bare feet. “You’re not going to, I don’t know, drag me to hell or something?”

“No!” The ghost—Ryou? Probably Ryou—sounds awfully affronted for someone who almost literally _scared someone to death_.

He peeks up just as Ryou plops his head back on, and Bakura resists the urge to dry heave. “Seriously? Because I can move.”

“No!” Ryou reaches toward him and Bakura flinches out of his seat. Ryou pulls his hand back to his chest. “I’m sorry. I’ve been alone here for a really long time.” He smiles. “It’s nice that someone’s here. I wasn’t trying to scare you—not really, anyway.” Bakura clambers back up onto the chair and Ryou steps back to give him room. “I’m Ryou, by the way.”

“Bakura.”

“I know.” Bakura scowls, and Ryou backpedals. “That was creepy, right? Sorry.” He flaps his hands awkwardly. “I’m not really good at this.”

“I noticed.”

Ryou chuckles. “Still sixteen, technically—no social skills.” Kicking up, he crosses his legs and floats above the countertop. “So, you’re a student?”

Bakura tries very hard to forget every horror movie he’s ever seen. He trips over his words anyway. “Yeah. Well, no. I mean, _yes_ , but I work, too. At a bar.”

“Oh!” Ryou nods, considering. “I suppose that explains all the alcohol in your cupboards.”

“I’m not a wino or anything, my boss just gives me the leftover—” Bakura stops, has a feeling he’s going to regret asking. “How do you know what’s in my cupboards?”

Ryou sticks his arm through the cupboard door. Bakura’s jaw drops. “Not _open_ them, exactly.” He pulls his arm back and traces a thin, red line on his neck, suddenly awkward.

Bakura hadn’t really wanted to know, in retrospect. He’s suddenly fascinated by the grain of the table, scratching a dent with his nail. “So, that whole story is true, then? About you—?” Somehow, _being murdered_ seemed like a crass way to end the sentence, so Bakura just trails off and grins weakly.

Bruises bloom across Ryou’s arm, and his cheek flares red from a blow. Bakura’s halfway across the kitchen for the first aid kit in the bathroom before he remembers corporeality is a prerequisite for requiring medical attention and shuffles back to his seat, sheepish. Ryou sinks partway into the fridge, face sticking out from the freezer door. “Yeah. Fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen?” Bakura slouches, grins again. “And you’ve been here all this time? You’re practically middle-aged, friend.”

Ryou laughs, startled, and he flickers out. Two magnets drop from the door. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Maybe this won’t be so bad. Marik did technically warn him, didn’t he? Bakura nods at the stereo. “So that was you, right? And reading the comic books?” Ryou hesitates, and Bakura adds, “I don’t mind or anything, just thought I was going crazy. Can you turn on the TV, too?”

Ryou shrugs. “I haven’t tried it.”

“Go on. Rishid—a friend of mine, you must’ve seen him do it, actually—brought it for me. I don’t watch it much.”

He’s expecting it, but the sudden sound from the TV still makes him jump, and he and Ryou watch a few minutes of some stupid infomercial before Bakura remembers what time it is. Stretching his arms over his head, he pads off to his bedroom. “Hey, I’m going to sleep.”

It takes Ryou a couple seconds to tear away from the screen, and he looks crestfallen. Bakura gestures at the TV, “You can keep it on, if you want. It’s not going to bug me. Same with the stereo and stuff. You’re welcome to it—it’s not like I have any time to use any of it.”

“Seriously?” The expression on Ryou’s face could break hearts, Bakura’s sure of it.

Bakura flicks on the light to his room, still looking at Ryou, who’s straight-up floating a foot off the ground. “Well, yeah. It’s not like—”

There’s a hand sitting on his bed.

Bakura jumps back so fast he whacks his elbow on the doorframe, pain bolting up his arm and overriding panic just enough that he doesn’t run screaming from the apartment, never to return. He swings out into the hallway to glare at his new roommate, and Ryou waves a stump at him. “What the hell?!”

Smug asshole isn’t even pretending it’s not funny. “Last time, I swear!”

“Like hell it is!” Bakura slams his door. “This is why I didn’t want a roommate! I hope you evaporate!”

Ryou cackles from the living room and the hand scuttles off the bed and through the door. Kicking at it would have been infinitely more satisfying if Bakura’s foot hadn’t passed right through it, and he skulks off to bed.

-

Bakura opens the cupboard and find the ghost’s head staring at him, “You should do your laundry.”

“Fuck!” Bakura slams the cupboard shut and jumps back. The head floats out after him. “What are you _doing?”_ Bakura had had high hopes that eventually it would stop scaring him. As of yet, no such luck.

Ryou’s head spins in a slow circle. “Commenting on the state of your clothing. You should do laundry.” He looks at the clock on the wall. “And eat breakfast. You don’t eat much, it’s not healthy.”

Bakura’s scowl deepens as he microwaves some instant rice, fishing a relatively clean fork out of the sink. Ryou’s head floats above him as he leans against the counter to eat. If he’d been alive, and not dismembered, Bakura could practically imagine feeling his breath on his neck. “Um, could you not hover?”

Ryou’s head jerks away, his body stepping out of the wall to plop his head back on. “Right, sorry. It’s just been a long while.” Ryou ducks his head, sheepish. “I’ve been lonely.”

Now that he’s gone and made a complete asshole of himself, Bakura looks away, staring intently at a spot on the ceiling, and mumbles, “It’s okay. Sorry. I’m not really good with people, either.” He turns and dumps his bowl in the sink. As he turns, he can feel the moment his elbow catches the box of salt he meant to put away and sends it flying, hitting the ground and spewing salt all over the floor. “Oh, damnit. Sorry, that probably caught you right in the—” Bakura turns back around to find Ryou on the other end of the kitchen. “Geez, I didn’t want you to hover, but I didn’t mean you had to keep fifty paces either, Ryou.”

Ryou rubs the back of his neck, flush creeping up his neck. “Um, no. It’s not that. It’s the salt.” He points at the line that poured from the box as it skittered across the linoleum. “It’s like a barrier.”

“Seriously? That sounds like something out of a fairytale, honestly.” Bakura grabs a wet paper towel and starts to wipe it up. “So that stuff is true? Like iron and crosses and shit?”

“Just salt for me.” Ryou steps closer as the salt starts to dissolve. Bakura’s still wiping when Ryou asks, “If it’s not fifty paces and I can’t hover, how close _can_ I be?”

All the blood rushes to Bakura’s face and he straightens mechanially, squeezing the paper towel so hard water drips all over his feet. Ryou takes another step. “Does this work?” Another. “Or this?” Closer still. If Bakura reached out, his hand would go right through Ryou’s chest. His face is a foot away. “Too close?”

Bakura swallows around a lump in his throat that wasn’t there a minute ago. “N-No. That’s good.”

Someone pounds on the door, breaking the moment of eye contact that isn’t as awkward as it should have been. Through the door comes, “Bakura! We’re going to be late! I’ve been loitering outside for like ten minutes!”

Both of them jump and Ryou vanishes just as Malik comes through the door. Malik frowns at the doorknob in his grip. “Do you know how to lock a door? Are we going to class or not?” Looking at Bakura’s bright red face, he smirks. “Was I interrupting some me-time?”

The wet, salty towel flies past Malik’s shoulder as Bakura squawks something unintelligible that sounds a bit like “ _nooooooooo,”_ and Bakura hears someone chuckle just behind him.

Malik leans against the doorjamb for a moment and glances around as Bakura scrambles to get ready. “The place is looking better. What did you do about the wrecked room?”

Bakura is suddenly incredibly aware that Ryou is right behind him. He clears his throat. “Oh. I just keep it shut.” For a second, he swears he can feel breath against the back of his neck and he flushes again, stooping to grab his backpack and leading the way into the hall. “Anyway, class?”

The elevator jolts and shudders down to the first floor and Malik leans against Bakura and yawns. “Let’s not go to class. Let’s run away and join the circus.”

“The circus doesn’t pay that well for clowns.”

Malik scowls up at him. “My brother is wearing off on you. I don’t like this.”

“You adore your brother.”

The doors slide open and Malik unlocks the car doors. “One of Marik is enough for me, thanks.”

Bakura mumbles something in reply, half-listening as he climbs into the car. Malik is just starting to pull the car into reverse when he jerks the car to a halt. “Is that someone in your house?!”

Bakura blurts, “What?!” before he can stop himself, but recovers with, “Are you fucking with me?”

Malik is glaring through the windshield at the apartment balcony and Bakura holds his breath. “No! I swear,” Malik leans back into the seat and rubs a hand over his face, stunned, “I swear I saw someone up there.”

“Oh?”

Malik scowls. “You’re sure nothing’s been happening?”

“Like what?” Bakura fiddles with his seatbelt and glances up at the balcony. “You don’t seriously believe in ghosts, do you?”

Malik shakes his head and pulls the car out of the lot. “Your house is giving me anxiety. You’re buying me coffee.”

Bakura smiles good-naturedly as they drive away, and looks into the rearview mirror just as it reflects his balcony.

Ryou is waving goodbye from the living room. Bakura groans and buries his head in his hands.

-

“You smell nice.”

Bakura looks up from his textbook. “Yeah, okay, that’s not creepy.”

Ryou flushes. “I’m sorry.” He rubs his neck. “Most things are just—fuzzy? I guess? I can’t really taste or touch things anymore, but I like smells. Candles and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bakura sets down his highlighter and grabs a pencil. “Like what kind?”

Ryou beams. “Cinnamon. And sage, sage smells really nice—clean. And vanilla! Definitely vanilla. One of the old neighbors used to have a candle that smelled like citrus, too, but I can’t leave the apartment, so I don’t know what kind, and—what are you doing?”

Bakura shows Ryou the list he’s scribbling. “Just something to keep in mind the next time I go to the store.”

Ryou’s freezes and he drops through the table, just his eyes peeking through his bangs from above the tabletop. His voice floats up from under the wood. “You don’t have to do that.” A moment later, he adds, “But so long as you’re getting it, you should get lavender, too.”

Bakura laughs at the sudden change in tune. “The place sort of smells like a junkie hide-out anyway, so the candles would do us both good. I don’t want to go to classes smelling like someone else’s extracurricular activities, you know?”

Floating up a little higher, Ryou nods. “The junkies weren’t that bad. They didn’t stay long—they were just sort of hard to scare off. Thought I was a hallucination.” He shrugs. “But none of them have come around in a couple years.”

“Am I literally the only person who didn’t know this place was haunted?”

The second the words leave his mouth, Bakura realizes how peevish he sounds and regrets them. Ryou cringes and sinks lower. “I’d leave if I could.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Bakura rubs a hand over his face, mulling over the new information on the material boundaries of being a ghosts. “Why can’t you leave?”

It’s quiet for a long while, before Ryou speaks again. “I tried, when I first woke up and—and was like _this_. But I can’t pass through the borders of the apartment. I can’t even go out on the balcony.” He flickers out and reappears sitting opposite Bakura. “I don’t know why.”

Ryou doesn’t offer any more, and after a while Bakura goes back to scribbling notes. Eventually, Ryou asks, nonchalantly, “Did you ever do your laundy?”

Bakura pauses. “Yes?”

One of Ryou’s hands scuttles across the table and taps its fingers against the open textbook. Bakura swears he feels his heart stop.

Ryou only hides his body parts in with the dryer sheets twice before Bakura stops thinking he’ll have a heart attack.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **ah look, plot exposition and bakura being an massive douchebag, just what every fanfic needs**

When his cell phone rings at four in the morning, Bakura snatches it up before he can think better of it. “Yeah?”

There’s thick static on the other end that almost lulls him back to sleep until finally, “Hello?”

“Uh-huh.” Bakura props himself up on his elbow, groggy. “Who is this?”

“Is this Bakura?”

He watches a minute go by on the glow of his alarm clock, running down a list of people who could call him in the ass hours of the night and be so very calm, and it suddenly hits him that the voice on the other end isn’t speaking Japanese. Something heavy settles in his stomach, and he snaps, “Who is this?!” Like he doesn’t know, like he couldn’t guess who would be so fucking _cruel_ —

The static buzzes in his ear for another moment and then, “How are you doing, Bakura?”

In lieu of an answer, Bakura hangs up before he can spew horrible, grammatically incorrect vitriol into the receiver. He resists the urge to throw his phone against the wall and tries to go back to sleep.

Outside the room, he hears, “Bakura?”

Well, fuck. He sits up, rubs his eyes. “Yeah?” Silence. “Come on in, Ryou.”

The ghost hesitates halfway through the door, forearms and face peeking through the wood. Bakura waves him the rest of the way in, and Ryou stops at the corner of the bed. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

Ryou arches an eyebrow, limbs starting to float away from his torso in a pretty explicit threat of tossing them about, and Bakura turns a bit green. “I’m serious! Totally okay! Put your appendages back where they belong, you creepy motherfucker.”

Ryou kicks his feet up and floats above the bed. “Who was on the phone?”

“I have no idea,” he tells Ryou, and it’s technically not a lie. “Some weirdo who wasn’t even speaking Japanese.”

“Your friends that come over don’t happen to speak Japanese all the time, either.”

Ryou’s more perceptive than Bakura gave him credit for. “Don’t you have a sheet to go hide under or something?” Ryou scowls and Bakura decides that he’s done enough grave-digging for a night. He waves Ryou closer. “Never mind. What’ve you been doing all night?”

“Listening to the radio.”

“Isn’t it all infomercials and crap this early?” Bakura leans over and pulls something from his bedside drawer. “That reminds me—I grabbed this for you. It’s an audio book.” He pops the disc in and hits play. “I don’t know if the book is any good, but the librarian gave me a little disc player and everything.”  Bakura looks up and arches an eyebrow when he sees Ryou on the far end of the bed. “Come on, sit down. I don’t bite or anything.”

Ryou shifts over next to Bakura, hovering for a moment before sinking onto the bed. The sheets don’t even move. “Thank you.”

Bakura rolls back over. “No problem. Just remind me to turn it on for you. I’m going back to sleep.”

“You can tell me, you know,” Ryou murmurs, “if something’s wrong.”

His cell phone is still where he tossed it when Bakura levels a glare at it. He’d like to pretend he remembers the voice from when he was little, but he knows it’s a lie.

Bakura pretends to go to sleep instead.

-

“You’re drunk. It’s not even noon, and you’re drunk.” Marik pauses just inside the door. “And why does it smell like Satan’s potpourri in here?”

Bakura looks up from his drink and giggles. “I’m sorry, what?”

Marik scowls, eyeing the bottle. Malik murmurs something under his breath, but neither of them switch back to Japanese, so Bakura is destined to suffer a while longer. “I’m sure you can’t. How much have you had to drink?”

“Not enough, I don’t think.” Ryou appears in the glass of the microwave, worried, and Bakura ignores him. He wonders if ghost superpowers extend to a universal understanding of all languages

Malik surreptitiously tips the bottle down the drain and starts putting out the candles with his fingers, and Bakura’s grip tightens on his cup. Malik arches an eyebrow and smoothly switches to Japanese just Bakura’s head was really starting to ache, bless him. “We have class tomorrow. You’re going to be so fucked up.”

Bakura scowls right back at them. “Don’t lecture me.” He braces against the wall and tries to stand, but thinks better of it. “What are you doing here?”

While his brother tries to think of a softer way to put it, Marik deadpans, “Heard you got a phone call.” _From back home,_ he doesn’t say, but it hangs over them like smog.

Bakura bristles, knocks his head back into the wall. It doesn’t hurt, and that should be concerning. “Fuck you. I’m fine.”

“Hardly.”

“Whatever, Marik,” Bakura snaps, “I’ve seen _exactly_ how much you can put away.”

Malik’s head whips up and his expression is _furious_ , but Marik shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest. “Granted.” Malik levels his shock on his brother and Marik shrugs again. “He’s got a point. We’ll let you sleep it off. See you tomorrow.” He heads out the door, glances over his shoulder. “Let’s go, Malik.”

Ryou reappears the second the door shuts. “They’re twins?” He rubs the seam on his neck. “I had a twin, too—I mean, he’s still alive, so I guess _he_ had a twin, not the other way around.”

Bakura vaguely remembers reading something like that. He tilts his head in what could be interpreted as a nod, hums noncommittally.

It’s quiet for a minute as Ryou shifts uncomfortably. “What language were they speaking to you?” He hovers over the windowsill, crossing and re-crossing his skinny legs.

Bakura stares at his cup and wonders if he can drown himself in an inch of alcohol, like little kids in swimming pools. “Egyptian.”

“Like hieroglyphics?”

He snorts. “Yeah, like that.” Leaning back against the wall, Bakura balances the cup on his knee. “My mom was from this little village in the bumfuck middle of the Sahara—I mean, fucking middle of _nowhere_. People only discovered them like twenty-five years ago; they’d been living the old way all this time. This little piece of Ancient Egypt some archaeologist literally fell into. It was some groundbreaking shit.” He runs a hand through his bangs. “My mom pissed off her family because she wanted to leave, to see everything they’d been missing, you know? But even after she married my dad, she taught me all about it.”

Ryou stares at his feet, tracing the seam on his neck like the world’s most macabre nervous tic.

Bakura smirks, swallows down the rest of the whiskey. “You can ask.” Hopefully, he won’t remember this tomorrow.

“Oh.” Ryou finally looks up at him. “Did they die?”

He’s going to need more booze. Bakura clambers to his feet, only a little unsteady, to rummage through the cupboards for another bottle. “My dad got shot because he fucked with some gangbanger’s kid, and my mom got really sick.” The drink he pours smells like rubbing alcohol. “When my mom died, some people showed up at the hospital in these crazy get-ups—I think they were my grandparents? I’m not sure, but they looked like her—and they said they were taking her body back home for burial rites.” It tastes like rubbing alcohol, too, and he gasps at the burn. “I don’t even know where home _is_.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bakura shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I was little. Next thing I know, Ishizu and her brothers are picking me up and I moved in with them. And then I just started sophomore year, figure I’ve been a burden long enough.” He gestures with the cup and liquor spills across his hand. “And now I’m here.”

“What about them?” Ryou’s feet don’t kick up the dust on the floorboards, and he takes an awkward step towards Bakura. If he disapproves of the drinking, he doesn’t say anything.

“Marik and Malik are a year older than me. They were born there, but their older sister got a job in Cairo when they got older, so her family followed her out, and then over here to Domino. She works at the museum. Her mom actually went back—she likes it better there.”

Ryou flickers out for a moment, surprised. “My father worked at the museum!” He pauses again, before adding, “My mother is dead, too. She died thirteen years ago.”

Bakura leans against the counter, pleasantly sloshed, just enough to not see the line between _sharing our traumas_ and _being a tremendous piece of shit_ as he careened over it. “Oh? You haven’t been dead that long. Did the guy who killed you kill her, too?”

The ghost fists his hands at his sides, scowling furiously at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Tipping the cup back up to his mouth, Bakura’s voice echoes against the plastic. “Come on, Ryou! I thought we were having story time! It’s not fair—”

The room is empty when he lowers his cup, and the drink sours in his stomach. Bakura snarls and hurls his drink in the trash.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _it's also hilarious seeing how much longer the chapters get, too. i think the first one was 3 pages, and now the latest chapter (11) topped out at like 13 pages._

The next morning, Bakura opens the fridge to find Ryou’s head sitting next to yesterday’s takeout. He yelps and slams the door shut, biting his tongue. “Fuck! Ryou!” He’s too hung-over for this shit. “I’m too hungover for this shit!”

Silence.

Bakura reconsiders his approach. “Look, Ryou, I’m sorry I was such an ass yester—”

Ryou’s voice floats through the door, high and reedy. “Are those any good?”

Apparently, they weren’t going to talk about it.

Bakura frowns. “The tacos from the place across the street? Yeah, they’re okay.” Ryou’s body walks past him and reaches through the fridge to reattach his head and Bakura is only moderately unnerved. “Why, do you want one?”

Ryou pouts. Honest-to-god pouting, and it makes Bakura’s head hurt. “No.” Bakura starts to open the fridge again, but Ryou puts a hand through his chest. “I mean, I can’t. Eat, really.” Goosebumps break out over Bakura’s bare chest and Ryou pulls his arm back. “Sorry.”

Bakura clears his throat. “So, um, where are you when you’re not here? I mean, where do you go when you,” he flaps his hands around, “you know, go poof?”

Ryou shrugs and it takes him a moment to speak, considering his words. “It’s just dark. Kind of like when I first died. Sometimes, I have…nightmares? I remember dying.” He pauses. “Being killed.”

Bakura reaches for him before he remembers, his fingers hovering just above a hand-shaped bruise on Ryou’s wrist. “Is that what these are? They just show up, sometimes. When you’re upset.”

The stereo slams on suddenly, pitched to a high whine. Ryou glances away and it cuts out. “I can’t help it.”

“Oh. I-I see.” Bakura shifts from foot to foot, tries not to notice how the marks on Ryou’s wrists are the same size as his own hands. “I gotta go to class, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ryou smiles, wanly. “You shouldn’t be late. I’ll just watch some TV.”

“Cool. Okay. See you.” Bakura ducks out the door and tries very hard not to throw up on the way to the bus stop.

-

Later, it catches his eye in the fog on the mirror when he gets out of the shower. Bakura sticks his head out of the bathroom, toothbrush dangling in his mouth. “Ryou? Did you draw something in the mirror?”

The ghost materializes in front of him, and when Bakura chokes on his toothpaste, Ryou has the decency to look ashamed. “Sorry.” He peers at the scribbles on the glass. “Yeah, that’s just so you’d stop cutting yourself shaving. Pretty simple.”

Bakura rinses his mouth out. “Sounds legit. Is that some sort of ghost thing?”

Ryou leans against the doorway, watching Bakura scrub his face in the sink. “Nope. Learned it from my mother.” He chuckles at Bakura’s bewildered expression in the mirror. “My family wasn’t exactly kosher, you know? Old Craft folk—as many generations back as we can count, and it doesn’t really help when your parents work with the occult for a living, too.”

“No shit?” Bakura turns around and yanks on a shirt. “That’s really cool, Ryou!”

“I think it might be why my family never came back here after it happened,” Ryou continues, nonchalant, as Bakura heads for the living room. “They were scared they might see me.”

It stops Bakura dead in his tracks, and he rubs a hand across his face. “Damn. You can’t just go and say things like that, Ryou. It makes me kind of throw up in my mouth a little bit and also want to hug you.”

Ryou cringes. “I’m sorry. Sometimes it just slips out and—” He stops. “Did you just say you want to hug me?”

Maybe if he keeps his back carefully turned, Ryou won’t see the furious red creeping up his face. “What? No!”

“Really?” Ryou’s grin is Cheshire-wide. “I think you did.”

“Nope. You are mistaken.” Ryou starts to float around to face him and Bakura throws his hands up. “Look at the time! It’s time for the news! Let’s watch the news, yeah?” He thumps down onto the couch and flips on the TV and stares steadfastly at the news anchor.

Goosebumps creep up his arm as Ryou settles in next to him. “I’d like to hug you, too.”

Bakura’s sure his face is a stellar shade of purple by now, and he adores Ryou all the more for not mentioning it.

-

Bakura notices the girl staring at him on his way to work probably the third time it happens.

And again, peering at him from around the corner when he heads into class.

And _again_ , when he steps out onto his and a pale blonde head vanishes into the corner store. He jerks his thumb at the street and Ryou peers over his shoulder. “Do we know who that is?”

Shocker, she’s gone when Ryou looks. “Who?”

“Some girl.” Bakura flops back onto couch. “I think she’s been following me?”

Ryou sends his hand skittering to the stereo to turn it off. “Well, it’s not like you’re not attractive.”

Bakura jerks, and peers over the back of the couch. “What? No! She’s a kid!” He pauses. “Wait, what did you say, exactly?”

But Ryou’s already gone.

Three days later, Bakura sees the girl yet again—when he creeps up behind her outside his student union building and announces, “We need to have a chat.”

She jumps and whirls around, and for just a second she looks startled and young. Then, “Damn straight.” Bakura just gawks at her, and she continues, “What are you doing in that apartment?”

He splutters minute, comes up with, “You’re like, what, nine?”

“I’m thirteen!”

Bakura snorts, “Whatever. You’re practically a fetus.”

The girl rolls her eyes. “Oh, yeah, because you’re fucking ancient, right?”

Every once in a while, Bakura’s glad he’s tall (not freakishly huge like that billionaire kid whose brother is in his chemistry class, but at least he isn’t those damn Motou brothers) as he looms over her. Belatedly, he hopes no one sees them playing out a scene straight from the Stranger-Danger pamphlets. “Hey, watch your mouth!”

“You’re being stalked, and you’re worried about my language?”

“So you admit to stalking me?”

She runs a hand through her bangs and Bakura thinks he’s seen her before. “No. Well, yes!” She leans against the wall and braces her backpack against her knees. An embroidered patch on the front pocket spells out ‘Amane’ in curly script. “I just want to know what you’re doing in that apartment.”

He goes for the joke. “I live there.”

Amane’s not amused. “You know what happened there, right? No one’s been in there since then, but my dad got a rent check from the apartment manager last month—”

Suddenly, Bakura knows _exactly_ who Amane reminds him off, the same pale hair and nervous tics. “Did—” He stops. Takes a deep breath. Starts again, “Did you say your _dad_? Your _family_ owns my apartment?” He sits, hard, the sidewalk cool under his legs. Distantly, Bakura hears Amane run off and he wants to yell something snide after her, but she comes back with a cold can from a vending machine and presses it against the back of his neck.

Above him, Amane mutters, “This is why I _didn’t_ want you to see me.”

“Hide better,” Bakura snaps, voice muffled by the hands he’s pressed to his face. Long minutes later, he sits back and takes the soda from Amane. “So, are you going to curse me or something for trespassing?”

Amane rolls her eyes and helps him to his feet. “What? No. Where are you getting your facts, late night horror movies?” She freezes, and Bakura almost topples back over when she drops his arm. “Wait, how did you know about that?”

“I just read some rumors online.” He stands for a minute under her sharp-eyed scrutiny before Amane clearly decides not to pursue the issue. She turns on her heel instead, slinging her backpack over her shoulder and walking off. Bakura grabs his bag and goes after her. “Hey! Where are you going?”

“You’re walking me home,” she tosses over her shoulder.

“I—Okay.” Three blocks later, Bakura asks, “I wouldn’t have thought your family would still own the apartment. I mean, I thought they would—”

“Take off as far as possible?” Amane pulls two candy bars from her bag and hands him one. “They considered it. Grandmother and Grandfather on Dad’s side are from the UK and we almost moved when I was really little. Back to our Druid roots or something like that.” Bakura chews his mouthful of chocolate and caramel and waits. Amane finishes hers and tosses the wrapper in a wastebasket before she continues, “But it was sort of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ after a while. Dad has his position at the museum that he couldn’t leave and my brother was starting university, so we stuck it out.”

“And then the check came.”

“And then the check came.” They round the corner on a quaint little house with blue shutters and a three-step porch. “I just wanted to see who lived there.”

Bakura tears a strip of paper from his notebook and scrawls his phone number on it. Amane just stares when he hands it to her. “Next time, you could just call and come over. It’s not like you don’t know where I live.” She says nothing, so Bakura flounders, “I mean, it’s clean and stuff now, there’s just the one room that I keep closed but other than that it’s—it’s okay? You’re not saying anything and that’s freaking me out.”

“This is really nice.” Bakura’s just formulating a reply when she adds, “I’m going to hug you now.”

Skinny arms with knobby elbows wrap around his waist and squeeze. Blood rushes to Bakura’s face. “Don’t mention it.”

Amane darts up the stairs and shuts the door with a quick, “Goodbye,” and Bakura is halfway across town when his phone buzzes.

_By the way, your curtains are totally see-through._

-

“So,” Bakura sticks his head in the fridge to look for the can of soda from yesterday, “That girl that we kept seeing outside the house?” He finds the can behind the leftover stew. “Turns out it was your sister.”

The temperature in the room drops ten degrees and the can freezes to his sweaty hand. He hits his head pulling out of the fridge, but when he turns to snap at Ryou, he stops. Ryou’s halfway through the table, eyes wide. “My _what?_ ”

Bakura does some quick mental math; Amane had said she was thirteen, and Ryou died fifteen years ago—“ _Shit_. Oh, shit. _Ryou_. Ryou, I’m so sorry.” It peels a layer of skin from his hand as Bakura sets the can down and moves toward the ghost. “I thought you knew.”

“You thought I _knew_?” Ryou’s panicked smile spreads across his face like cracked glass, and that’s when Bakura knows there’s not coming back from this. His hair stands on end. “I’ve been stuck.” He throws his arms out wide and the stove door groans and dents in. “ _Here_. In this goddamn, stupid, empty house!” Ryou laughs, hysterical. “This goddamn, stupid, empty house that I can’t _leave_. That I’ve been trapped in, _alone_ , for fifteen fucking years.” He’s crying, and Bakura guts turn over on themselves—gods, he’s such a shit. “And you thought I _knew?”_

“Ryou, seriously—I wasn’t thinking! I’m just stupid—”

He blinks and Ryou is looming right over him, floating a good three feet off the ground. “What is it about you,” he hisses, furious, “that brings them to you?” He punches a fist through Bakura’s chest and it burns. Bakura’s throat catches around a scream. “My brother never _once_ came in here! I watched him from the windows and _screamed_ for him! I _begged_ him! And I _know_ he saw me! I found out our mother died from the neighbor’s TV—I don’t even know how it happened! My _sister_ watched _you!_ Talked to _you!”_ Ryou beats his fists against his own chest and they both hear his sternum crack before it heals over again. “They’re _my_ family!” he screams. Bakura clutches his head as his ears pop. “Why do _you_ get them and not me? It’s not _fair!”_

The silence that follows is harrowing, and all Bakura can hear is his own hard breathing because Ryou’s chest heaves but makes no sound and that’s suddenly so disturbing. He scrambles from where he’s pinned against the fridge and bolts for the door. There’s a brief moment where he and Ryou stare at each other across the front threshold, but Bakura’s chest hurts worse than the look on Ryou’s face and he’s booking it for the elevator.

-

It isn’t until he’s climbing up the fire escape and through the window of Marik’s room that it occurs to ask, “Do you mind if I sleep here?”

Marik’s eyes glow in the dark. It’s really creepy, and Bakura’s never asked why, but they always have. He watches Bakura like it’s taking him a moment to focus on his face. “What? Sleep here?”

It’s not really a question, so Bakura kicks off his shoes and army crawls from the fire escape to flop onto the bed. When he rolls over to stare at Marik, he sees the glint of tinfoil in the trash can. “Are you high?”

Voice syrup-slow, Marik chuckles. “Of a sort.” Stretched out against the wall, his long legs stretch halfway across the smallish room. “Take the bed.”

Bakura just nods and rolls back over. After a few minutes, he can hear Marik moving around—probably settling into the ratty armchair he got from Otogi. Suddenly, “Are you okay?”

Before he can stop himself, “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

Bakura snorts. “Okay, thanks.”

When he sneaks out the next morning, Marik pretends not to be awake.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **today on "not talking about our feelings and letting nosy older sisters do the talking (blood magic) for you" and also the "y!bakura's back and out to ruin everyone's fun" play-hour**

Two days later, Bakura waits until Marik’s pulled away to take the elevator up to his apartment, because he imagines that his imminent death isn’t something he should force one of his only friends to witness. Bakura’s very sure there will be amputation and limb-flinging involved, and not necessarily just Ryou’s, detachable as his body parts were.

Instead, Ryou is standing on the ceiling when Bakura walks in—as it turns out, gravity has very little bearing on the dead. He regards Bakura for a minute, way too calmly to be good for Bakura’s health, then says, “It turns out I can’t turn on the audio book by myself. The TV and the stereo I can manage, but not the player. How strange.”

This has to be a trap. Bakura sets down his backpack by his shoes and steps further into his apartment. Ryou watches him. “That’s….interesting?”

“Mmhm.” Ryou reorients himself, crossing his legs and hovering over the table. “Also, the peaches in the fridge are getting moldy.”

Bakura just stares at him. “You want to talk about the peaches in the fridge?”

Ryou shrugs. “Why not?”

“Are we really not going to talk about _this_?” Bakura flings his arms out, jabs a thumb at the stove. His voice rebounds back to him and he sounds a lot angrier than he actually is. “Ryou, you nearly brought the damn house down!”

Silence.

“And I get that you’re angry—God, I get it! I am sorry like you wouldn’t believe, but you can’t just let it go like that!”

Ryou doesn’t say a damn word.

“Clearly, it’s bothering you!” Bakura snaps. “You can’t just pretend that nothing happened when I haven’t slept in my own house in two days—”

Someone knocking on the door interrupts him, and Bakura suddenly realizes how loud he was yelling. Mortifying. He locks eyes with Ryou just before the ghost vanishes. “We are going to finish this conversation.”

Ryou shrugs again.

The door stick in the jamb for an awkward second before Bakura can yank it loose, and he starts, “Sorry about that, this apartment is so old and I haven’t gotten around to, you know, maintenance and—” He looks up at his visitor. “Oh.”

It’s Ryou, if Ryou ate kittens for breakfast and picked his teeth with the finger-bones of small children. The angles of Ryou’s face are harsh on this man and his hair is dark where Ryou’s is light and—and he’s saying something while Bakura just stares at him. He shakes his head. “Sorry?”

“I was saying,” repeats the stranger in a voice that’s just a bit _too_ smooth, “I knew someone who used to live here.” He smiles, embarrassed, and Bakura is smitten for a moment. “I got a bit nostalgic like a complete loon, but I was also wondering if he left any sort of forwarding address?”

“I just moved here a few months ago, and I don’t remember seeing anything. I can check, though.” It’s out of his yap before Bakura can think it through, and he follows up with, “Tea?”

“Black, if you wouldn’t mind.” The man looks Bakura up and down and looks away to the balcony—it’s almost like Bakura’s failed some sort of test, and he shakes his head clear as he puts the kettle on. He pours them both a cup of tea and tries to think of his next move.

“I think I might have some of the old tenant’s mail in my closet,” Bakura tells him, then promptly books it to the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. “Ryou! Ryou, what the hell is going on?! That guy looks just like you, and he’s not here for any forwarding address!”

The pipes in the wall whine with strain and Ryou appears with a pop, jamming himself into the corner of the bathroom. He digs his fingers into his head so hard that his joints creak. The mirror cracks down the middle and Bakura jumps away from the sink. “Ryou!” The ghost drops into a crouch, rocking on his heels, and Bakura follows him down. “Ryou? You’re freaking me out, what the fuck is going on?!” A terrible thought occurs to him, and he lurches forward, pale. “ _Please_ tell me that’s not the guy that murdered you.”

Ryou’s head jerks up to look at him, livid bruises creeping up his cheekbones. “It’s—It’s not. That’s my _brother_.”

“Your brother?” Bakura parrots back. “I thought you were twins!”

“He’s taller than me,” Ryou gasps, “and older now, obviously. And his hair is _darker_ —but it’s him!”

“Okay, okay.” Bakura cracks open the door, and down the hall he can just see the back of his guest’s head. “I’ll go get rid of him, somehow.”

Ryou’s fingers claw through him when he grabs for Bakura’s arm. “Be _careful_.”

Bakura frowns. “What the hell does that mean? Is he dangerous or something?”

“Or something.” Ryou shakes his head so hard it has to hurt. His eyes snap back up to Bakura’s and a cut is forming around one eye. “Just _get rid of him_.”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.” Bakura backs out of the bathroom and takes a deep breath before heading back into the kitchen. Ryou’s brother is just where he left him, staring into his teacup. Bakura tries for a smile as he comes around the table, leaning against the counter that separated kitchenette from living room. “What did you say your name was?”

Bakura’s guest looks up from his tea and smiles placidly. It gives Bakura the creeps. “I don’t think I did.”

A bolt of cold shoots down Bakura’s spine, and he’s suddenly very afraid. His guest’s hands tighten around his cup. “Look, it’s been nice and all, but I think it’s time for you to—”

Someone knocks on the door and Bakura flinches hard. Ryou’s brother barely moves, arches a slim, dark eyebrow. “Are you going to answer that?”

His throat is dry; it makes Bakura croak when he speaks. “Come in.”

Marik peeks his head around the door, expression tightening as he looks from Bakura to the man at the table. “Am I interrupting?”

“No.” Bakura takes a shaky sip of his tea. “Not at all. He was just leaving.”

“I see.” Marik shakes the hand that’s offered when the man rises from his seat. “Marik.”

“Akefia,” Ryou’s brother says, the curl of his lips betraying the lie. “Pleasure.” He looks Marik up and down, and he smiles again.

“Likewise. “ They’ve stopped shaking hands, but it takes Marik a moment to let go. Bakura feels like he’s missing something. He tears his eyes away and looks at Bakura. “I got your call—about going to the band’s gig tonight? Malik’s got homework, so I figured we could just take my bike.” Marik pauses, and then fills the awkward silence with, “Otogi’ll shank us if we’re late,” arching an expectant eyebrow at his friend.

That prompts Bakura into motion. “Right. Right, we should get going.” He looks at Ryou’s brother. “Sorry.”

Marik moves to step away from Ryou’s brother when Akefia reaches after him, other hand pulling something from his pocket. Bakura reacts before he thinks it through, fingers closing around his mug. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his toaster rise from the counter and hover within striking distance of the man’s head. Akefia meets his eye and smirks, pulling a pen from his pocket and scrawling something on Marik’s palm. “Good to meet you, Bakura.” He steps out the door and says over his shoulder as he leaves, “Thank you for the tea.”

The toaster sinks back to the counter with a clank.

Marik whips his head around at the sound, flexing his fingers, and Bakura frowns. “Since when do you knock?”

“I saw the car parked in your parking space. I figured someone was here.”

Bakura watches Marik trace his palm a couple of times. “What did he write?”

“His phone number.” Marik isn’t quite looking at him.

That bolt of terror is back. “Don’t do it.” Bakura grabs Marik’s shoulder. “Seriously, he is really bad news. Just don’t, okay?”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” His voice is so sharp is catches Bakura by surprise, and muscles tighten under his palm. Marik takes a step away from him and rolls his shoulder free of Bakura’s grip. The toaster shifts uneasily on the countertop, and Bakura shoots it a look.

All at once, Marik exhales, curling in on himself and loosening up. His grin is lopsided and familiar. “Sorry. Rough day.” Clears his throat. “Don’t worry about it.” Marik pulls his keys from his pocket and dangles them in front of Bakura’s face. “Concert?”

Walking out the door, Bakura glimpses Ryou in the hallway mirror. He looks about as worried as Bakura feels.

-

Bakura doesn’t realize he’s dozing off on the couch, halfway through Ryou’s leg, until someone knocks on the door and he jerks straight up and off the couch. Scrambling for the TV remote and the front door at the same time, it’s not until he mutes the game show that he remembers peep holes are for looking _through_ , not _at_ , and Ryou’s laughing at him all the while.

There’s a familiar form standing outside. Spinning on his heel, Bakura jabs the remote at Ryou. “It’s Ishizu!”

Through the door, “Do you plan on letting me in?”

Bakura struggles with the lock for ten seconds longer than he should have while Ryou vanishes, yanks the door open and shields his eyes from the glint across Ishizu’s collarbone. “Damn, the rocks on that thing. Nice necklace.”

Ishizu runs a finger along the rubies. “Thank you. I do find it a bit extravagant, but Seto purchased it for me.”

Bakura makes a terrible face. “I don’t know how you two have been dating so long. That whole family is weird.”

“What do you have against Mokuba?”

“Nothing!” Bakura flaps his hand around in lieu of explanation. “He’s great, as far as kid geniuses who take college classes in their spare time go.” Ishizu steps into the house and Bakura shuts the door behind her. “It’s just, you’re, you know, an actual human being with emotions and Seto’s—well, I don’t see what you and Seto have in common.”

Ishizu’s smile is sly. “I seem to remember a relationship with a certain Motou brother that the same could be said about. Atem says hello, by the way.”

“Tell him he can go jump off a cliff.”

“See, if you’d spent more time trying to find commonalities instead of fighting and having _incredibly_ raucous make-up sex after, perhaps that relationship would have ended better.”

Bakura smothers his face in his hands and wails, “We are _not_ talking about this.”

“Quite. It’s really an inappropriate subject to bring up in front of guests.” Ishizu nods in the direction Ryou vanished with all the calm and poise of the apparent fucking _psychic_ that she is.

Bakura’s jaw drops and Ryou is so surprised that he flickers back into view. “How did you know?”

Her smile is wry. “I know everything.” She pulls out a chair for herself and sits. “I see you’ve managed to kill my cactus.”

“He threw it at me,” Ryou chirps, charmed. Bakura shoots him a dirty look. “But he bought me candles, so I suppose it’s alright.”

Ishizu arches a slim eyebrow. “Bakura bought you candles? How terribly romantic.”

Bakura’s certain his face is a mortifying shade of purple, and it’s a small consolation that Ryou flushes pink. Ishizu smiles at them both, and Bakura understands why the entire Ishtar family revolves around Ishizu. “You’re a cruel, cruel beast under that pretty face,” he mutters.

“What was that?”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Nothing.”

She sets her bag up onto the table and pulls out a box from the bakery across the street. The room smells like chocolate and Bakura’s mouth waters. Ryou hovers closer. “Are those brownies?”

Ishizu hesitates. “Would you like some?”

Ryou frowns. “I, uh, I can’t. They just smell good.”

“I see. I know a candle that smells like these,” she offers. “I can write down the name for Bakura.”

“Would you, really?”

Ishizu nods, and Bakura watches as Ishizu and Ryou have some sort of secret, silent conversation that lesser mortals such as he clearly aren’t privy to, because Ryou waggles his fingers awkwardly and clears his throat. “Well, um, I should probably—oh, hey, is that the light?” He grins, sheepishly. “I’m going to go—head towards it, or something. Yeah.” He flickers out with a little wave.

Bakura shakes his head in disbelief and sits opposite Ishizu. “Did you just scare a ghost away? I don’t think that’s how it works.”

Ishizu stares at him with all the manufactured calm an exasperated older sister can manage. “How are you?”

He shrugs and takes a bite of his brownie. “I’m alright. I go to classes, I work. I sleep.” Bakura jerks a thumb at the TV. “Rishid got me bootleg cable, so I watch TV. You know, the news and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“I leave it on during the day for Ryou. He likes daytime shows.”

She nods, and Bakura probably just escaped a gruesome evisceration. “Are you eating?”

“Mostly Thai food. And the taco place across the street. Ryou likes the smell, and I’m really,” Bakura thinks about it, “broadening my culinary horizons.”

“There are ways to ground him.” Ishizu lowers her voice and it takes a solid five seconds for Bakura to realize she’s no longer speaking Japanese. She continues, with a subtle glance around, “To bring him here, physically. For a time.”

The one-eighty catches Bakura by surprise. His tongue is unruly as he stumbles over the words, “Can you….demonstrate?” Fuck, he’s rusty.

Ishizu doesn’t comment on his thick accent or shit grammar and something warm balloons in his chest and makes his throat tighten. “Show you?”

That’s the verb he was looking for. “Yes. Can you show me?”

“I will ask, back home. Most of them have phones now, so it’s easier.” Ishizu leans forward. “Your grandparents ask about you. Your grandmother wants to call again.”

Bakura stands loudly, smacking his palms against the table and shoving his chair back. Not dealing with this. “Thanks for your help,” he says in Japanese. His smile is tight, but they both pretend not to notice. “And for stopping by. Sorry about your cactus.”

“That’s fine. Goodbye, Bakura.” She leans back into the house just before she walks out the door to add, “Goodbye, Ryou!”

“Bye!” He pops up right behind Bakura, who jumps about a foot in the air. “I like her.”

“You would, you scary, headless bastard,” Bakura grumbles as he shuts the door behind her and heads back into the living room to turn on the TV.

Ryou arches an eyebrow, looking startlingly like Ishizu as he settles on the couch next to him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Fifteen minutes into the game show Ryou asks, “Incredibly raucous make-up sex?” and Bakura sort of wants to die.

-

Two weeks later, he gets a letter in the mail with the Domino Museum letterhead—Ishizu, obviously—and another potted cactus. Bakura scowls when he flips open the letter to find it entirely in hieroglyphics, except for a small note at the bottom in Ishizu’s impeccable handwriting: _You need the practice anyway._

It’s instructions for tying spirits to the physical world, but the letter doesn’t include instructions on how to handle an existential crisis about the actual existence of practical magic, so Bakura substitutes in some whiskey and does just fine. He picks out the words _knife_ , _blood_ , and _ashes_ , and pulls out his phone to send a text to Malik. _I think your sister is trying to kill me._

His phone buzzes with a response a minute later. _At least you’ll have company._


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _and unlike everyone else who had to deal with our bullshit on tumblr, y'all don't have to wait a year for this update, haha. also, finally, a teeny bit of porn and we earn our rating_

It takes Bakura a week to translate the letter, and then another two days to get all the supplies. It’s as he’s pressing the knife to his skin and slicing a line down the side of his forearm that he thinks, maybe, he should have had Ishizu proofread his translation. He slices the other arm and looks down at what he’d painstakingly drawn in sycamore ash, but his vision starts to get a bit shaky with endorphins and adrenaline and the blood drips down across the writing just like it’s supposed to and it _looks_ correct, doesn’t it?

Three minutes later, Ryou materializes across the room and presses a hand to his mouth, turning pale. “Oh, _no_.” He whimpers, a strangled, thin sound in the back of his throat, and Bakura almost puts the blade away and calls it quits. Go figure, Ryou’s not a fan of gaping wounds. Cuts and bruises reappear on Ryou’s arms and bleed through his shirt, and Ryou digs the fingers of his free hand into the seam of his neck. His voice is muffled by his fingers. “You’re _bleeding._ Bakura, don’t.”

Bakura drops his head into the crook of his elbow, lightheaded, but he looks up at Ryou and chuckles. “I think it might be a bit late for that.”

Ryou’s upper body jerks forward like he wants to move towards Bakura, but he presses his fist to his lips harder. Sluggish blood starts to drip from his neck. “The bl-blood—there’s so much _blood_ , you’re g-gonna—you’re gonna _die_ , Bakura, stop! Stop!” He stumbles forward, tripping over the loose floorboard and landing hard in front of Bakura. His knees smear over the writing in ash and he rips the knife out of Bakura’s hand, fingers scrabbling over his arms to stop the bleeding. “Stop! This is stupid, I don’t want you to die—Are you even _listening_ to me?!”

Bakura is staring, stunned, at their hands. “Ryou. Ryou, _look_.”

“No! I know you what you wanted to do, but it’s _okay_ , I’m okay like this—” Bakura’s fingers wrap tight around his jaw and pull his gaze down. “Oh, my God.” Ryou’s hands are wrapped, warm and solid, around Bakura’s wrist, blood trickling through the cracks of his fingers. “Oh, my _God_.”

“There’s a first aid kit under the bathroom sink.” Bakura grins wide. “Go grab it.”

Ryou’s off like a shot, bare feet slipping on the floor, crashing into the wall and knocking down what sounds like half of the bathroom cabinet before skidding back into the living room. Bakura traces his thumb over a bruise on Ryou’s jaw as the ghost bandages his arms. “Does it hurt?”

Ryou thinks about it. “Yes. Not bad, though,” he backpedals. “It just—I can feel it. That’s good. I—I like it.” He runs his fingers down Bakura’s arm, pressing against his skin. “How long does this last?”

A shrug. His head is spinning, and Bakura thinks Ryou might have been onto something about that whole dying shtick. “I don’t know. A week, at least. The _Little Egyptian’s Handbook on Summoning the Dead_ wasn’t exactly specific.” He straightens his legs and examines the bandages on his arms. “I’m just glad it work—”

And then Ryou is kissing him, fingers tacky with Bakura’s blood but grabbing his face anyway, crowding him up against the wall. Bakura’s arms sting when he wraps them around Ryou’s waist to cinch them closer, but Ryou gasps into the kiss and it’s completely worth it. When he pulls back, Ryou freezes. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

The arms around his waist keep him from budging. Bakura grins. “I don’t mind.”

“My fingers are stuck to your face.”

“I still don’t mind.”

“Oh.” It takes Ryou a second. “Oh!”

And Bakura kisses him again.

-

Bakura wakes up to Ryou pressing kisses to his neck.

His flailing isn’t terribly romantic, he’s sure, and it ends with his hands flat on Ryou’s thighs where he’s straddling him. One of Ryou’s hands is tangled in Bakura’s hair. He kisses Bakura’s jaw. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.”

Bakura huffs out a laugh. “Good morning to you, too.” He stares at his alarm clock. “I have to leave for the bus in twenty minutes, Ryou.”

Ryou’s leg press tighter against his hips and Bakura seriously considers skipping class. Ryou hums against Bakura’s pulse. “Stay with me instead.”

“I—” Ryou rolls his hips and Bakura whines. He’s going to miss his bus. ”Oh my God, that’s not _fair_.”

Ryou does it again. Bakura can feel the smirk pressed against his collarbone, the smug bastard. “I know.”

Bakura flips them over and Ryou laughs, pressed into the sheets. He tangles his hands back into Bakura’s hair when the man leans down to nip his collarbone. Bakura chuckles against bare skin. “The things I could do to you.”

Ryou arches underneath him when Bakura slides his hands down Ryou’s sides. “Really? Like what?”

Bakura slides a hand down Ryou’s pajama pants. “Like this.”

“And then?” Ryou’s voice holds out a long whine when Bakura squeezes, and damn, that’s hot.

“And then,” Bakura murmurs, and goes in for the kill, “I’m going to feed you breakfast.”

Ryou jerks his head back, stunned. “What?” He gapes after Bakura as the man stands and heads for the kitchen. “Are you _serious_?”

Bakura smirks over his shoulder. “Sucks, huh?”

He hears Ryou flop back onto the bed with an exasperated groan. “You’re such an ass!”

“You love my ass!”

Bakura’s frying eggs when cold hands slip under the waistband of his sweatpants and nails dig into his hips. Ryou rests his head against Bakura shoulder. “I do love your ass.” He squeezes Bakura’s hips once and then pads away. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

“Okay. Want to go to the park later?” Bakura takes the eggs off the heat and mutters, “Since I’m obviously not going to class.” He gets no response, and he peers into the hallway. “Ryou?”

Ryou’s glaring at the closed bathroom door with his hand pressed to his nose, and it only takes Bakura a second to realize what’s happened. He slaps a hand over his mouth and sucks deep breaths through his nose to keep from laughing. Ryou fixes his thunderous expression on him instead. “Did you try to walk through the bathroom door?”

“Yes,” Ryou snaps. “I sort of…..forgot.” He scowls as Bakura opens the door for him. “So rude.”

“Just don’t try to pop your head off to scare me, okay?” Bakura chuckles at his own joke and lets Ryou brush past him. “Need help with anything else?”

Ryou keeps eye contact with him as he unbuttons his shirt—which actually happens to be one of Bakura’s and fuck, this boy is going to be the death of him. It drops to the ground and Bakura’s eyes track it. Ryou steps into the bathroom and just undoing the drawstring of his pants when he hums under his breath, says, “No, I think I’m good,” and swings the door closed.

Bakura barks out a laugh and leans his head against the bathroom door. “You’re gonna break my heart, Ryou!”

The door swings back open and Ryou is kissing him again, hands tangling in his hair and pressed flush against him and very, very naked. He drags his teeth against Bakura’s lower lip when he pulls away and tells Bakura, very seriously, “I would never break your heart.”

Wrapping his arms around slim hips, Bakura traces his fingers up Ryou’s spine. “I believe you.”

Neither of them moves for several minutes, and then Ryou asks, “Can we have tea with breakfast?”

“Um, yes?” Bakura turns to head back to the kitchen, but long fingers wrap around his wrist and tug.

Ryou smirks. “On second thought, maybe I might need some help after all.”

-

“You,” Bakura tells him, as he watched Ryou inhale his fifth brownie, “are going to make yourself sick.”

Ryou gives him a look and mouths, “Shut up,” through a mouthful of chocolate, and Bakura pushes the glass of milk in his direction. The lady at the counter watches them with an indulgent smile. Ryou polishes off the last bite and downs half the glass of milk before coming up for air. “They’re just as good as they smelled.”

“I’ll remind you that you said that,” Bakura tells him as they stand up to leave, “when you throw all of those up later.” Ryou flips him off—and the lady behind the counter actually coos at them what the actual _fuck_ can Bakura learn how to be that adorable or is that shit just innate— and heads straight for the wall, but Bakura slings his arm around Ryou’s waist just in time to steer him through the door. He lets Ryou lead their lazy meander down the city streets for a while before Bakura turns them around a corner and the park opens up in front of them.

It’s his favorite, the one he always stops by after classes when he has the time and he’s too busy being a sap to notice Ryou’s dead stop until he almost runs right into him and sends him careening down the entryway steps. Bakura arches an eyebrow and takes an awkward step back. “Problem?”

Ryou makes a face at the incline. “I haven’t really, um, _done_ stairs in a while.”

Oh, well, that’s fine. Just your standard re-corporeality problems, not “why are you taking me on romantic strolls, you fuck, I just like blowing you” problems.

“Huh, yeah, forgot about that.” Bakura sweeps his arm under Ryou’s legs and ducks a flailing arm to carry Ryou down the stairs. Ryou’s face turns a deep shade of red as he presses closer, and lingers when Bakura lets him down at the bottom of the stairs.

Two old women are sitting at a bench close by, and they wave to get Bakura’s attention before crowing halfway across the park, “You two make such an adorable couple!”

Bakura flushes so hard he can _feel it_ , but Ryou tangles his fingers with Bakura’s and responds with equal volume and twice the enthusiasm. “Thank you!”

He waits until they’re a decent ways away, Ryou pulling him toward the swing set. “Is that—is that a thing we are?”

Ryou plops into the seat and kicks his feet up. He tilts far enough back that he considers Bakura upside-down. “I suppose? I don’t see why not.”

Bakura sinks into the swing next to him and watches him go back and forth for a while. “Okay.”

Ryou jerks to a halt, borrowed sneakers digging into the wood chips. He frowns. “Are you having an existential crisis about the fact that I’m technically not alive?”

“No?”

“Don’t do that.” Ryou kicks up again. “Just swing with me instead.” Bakura shoves off and watches the world get further and further below him, and for a while, they’re both quiet. “I didn’t think you liked me at first,” Ryou adds, conversationally, “I’m glad I was wrong. I’m glad we were friends.”

The emphasis doesn’t escape Bakura’s notice. “ _Were_ friends?”

“We,” Ryou laughs, tilted back again so his hair brushes the ground as he swings backwards, “are an adorable couple now, or didn’t you notice?”

Tension Bakura didn’t know he was carrying bleeds out from the set of his shoulders. “Just like that?”

“Mmhm. Just like that.”

-

He feels Ryou settle across his hips while he dozes on the couch before work, and Bakura cracks an eye open only because he knows he’ll enjoy the view, it’s been days and he’ll never be sick of this view. “There are other places to sit than on me.”

Ryou flattens against him, tucking his head just under Bakura’s chin. Spindly arms wrap around Bakura’s torso. “I know. Do you mind?”

Humming something noncommittal, Bakura trails his fingers down Ryou’s spine. “No, I don’t mind at all.” His mouth keeps going without his say-so. “Why? Is not minding a problem? Because I can—”

Ryou kisses him, nipping his bottom lip, and levels him with a look. “Take me to work with you, Bakura, and buy me a drink.” He runs his hands up under Bakura’s shirt and drags his nails down Bakura’s back.

God _damn_. “Are you even old enough to drink?”

Ryou looks up from sucking a mark into his collarbone and deadpans, “If I’m old enough to die in the heat of mortal combat, I think I can handle some body shots.”

_Christ_.

-

The bar is thrumming with music when they arrive, and Bakura remembers only then that it’s club night. “Shit.” He leads Ryou in through the back door. “I don’t exactly dance.”

Ryou grins at him—is he wearing _eyeliner_? does Bakura even _own_ eyeliner?—and slings himself onto a barstool in a way that is fucking _illegal._ “Buy me a drink, Bakura. We’ll see where it goes from there.”

Bakura can’t find enough saliva in his mouth to answer before Mai appears from the cellar door with a case of booze perched on her hip, and she looks Ryou up and down for a grand total of 2.7 seconds before: “You must be the guy Bakura’s over the moon about.”

This is his boss and he can’t reach over the bar and throttle her, so Bakura settles for an emphatic, “Mai!”

Ryou throws an amused look at Bakura. “Over the moon?”

Mai hands Bakura the case of booze and throws her arm around Ryou’s shoulder. “God, he wouldn’t shut up about you! Ryou this, and Ryou that, and unrequited love up to his eyeballs.” She smirks. “Well, not exactly unrequited, I’m guessing.” Glancing over at Bakura, “Just leave the case in the back, I’ll have Jou grab it later.”

“Jounouchi?” Bakura pushes behind the bar and drops the case onto the back table. The music is much louder here where the back office shares a wall with the main room, and he has to yell to be heard at the front of the bar. “You hired _Jounouchi_?”

Mai shrugs. “Hey, you said he was a nice kid, and he’s not bad to look at.” She winks conspiratorially at Ryou. “Jou used to come in when Bakura was dating this one other guy, with crazy hair—”

Bakura grumbles something rude at the gossip mill behind him as he shoves back out to where Ryou is sitting and nods at Jou, who’s already pouring drinks for what looks of half of Domino at the other end of the bar.

“Besides,” Mai leans over the counter to yell in his ear, “Jou is the reason you’re off tonight! Surprise!”

Bakura eyes Jou. “You think he needs help?”

“Nah, better to just throw him into it! You turned out fine!”

Bakura watches Jou fumble with a bottle of tequila. “Are you su—”

Mai claps him on the shoulders and shoves him a step away from the bar. “Bakura!” She grins. The music is thumping so loud he can feel it through her fingertips. “No work tonight! Go make out with your boyfriend!”

Hands wrap around him and tug on the collar of his shirt. “I like this plan,” Ryou murmurs in his ear.

Two shots slide down the bar toward them and Jou mouths over the pounding bass, “On the house.”

Bakura knocks his shot back and nudges Ryou’s closer to him. “I’m pretty fond of this plan, too.”

-

Four more shots each and two hours of dancing later, _we’ll see where it goes from there_ turns out to be manhandling each other down the hallway towards the bathroom with Ryou’s tongue halfway down Bakura’s throat and those _hips_ , goddamnit, grinding up against his—

Bakura slams the bolt on the bathroom door home and shoves Ryou against it, slotting a knee between his thighs and yanking his hair back to sink his teeth into the skin where neck met shoulder. Ryou’s hips arch away from the door, and Bakura slides his hand around to grab his ass and grind. Someone on the other side tries the doorknob, and pounds on the door when it doesn’t give.

“Busy!” Ryou shouts at the pounding on the door, then to Bakura, “What are you—” His throat clicks, dry, as Bakura slides to his knees and takes Ryou’s pants with him. Ryou’s head hits the door with a solid _thunk_ in time to the pounding on the door—fucking _seriously_ , can’t they tell Ryou is about to get _laid_ —when Bakura grips him through his underwear before pulling it down and leaning close. “ _Ah_.”

Bakura licks a long stripe up the side of Ryou’s cock and Ryou makes a low, rough noise in the back of his throat when Bakura curls his tongue over the head before bobbing back down. Bakura grins around him and hums absently, then hums again harder when fingers dig into his hair hard enough to hurt. He digs his fingers into Ryou’s thighs in retaliation and pulls him close enough to slide all the way down, thinks about leaving better sorts of bruises all over his skin as Ryou _keens_ and curls over him.  

The doorknob starts jiggling again and Bakura realizes he’s sucking cock on the bathroom floor of his job with his _boss_ a room away and bends to the task, swallowing around Ryou and cheeks hollowing as his jaw starts to ache. Ryou’s fingers run through his hair and tug hard in warning, and he manages to stutter out Bakura’s name before coming down his throat. Bakura sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as Ryou’s knees buckle and he slides down the door into Bakura’s lap. There’s a massive bruise blooming on his neck and Bakura’s the one who put it there and suddenly, Bakura wants to be home so hard it _hurts_.

Ryou’s ghost powers clearly involve clairvoyance, because he eyes Bakura up and down—and Bakura realizes _he’s_ so hard it hurts—and murmurs, “You should call us a cab.”

“Yeah,” Bakura stands on numb, impatient legs. “Yeah.”

-

Ryou stumbles into the kitchen the next morning, eyeliner smudged around his eyes, hair messy. “Wow.”

“If that’s a compliment to my dancing, did you mean horizontal or vertical? Both, maybe?” Bakura yelps when Ryou smacks him on the ass on his way to the cabinets. “Rude!”

Pressing himself against Bakura’s back, Ryou slides his hands up the front of Bakura’s shirt and presses his face against the crook of his neck. “Shut up.”

“Go get me the jam, yeah?”

Ryou grumbles but peels himself away, slouching towards the fridge. “The things I do for you.”

Bakura laughs and his phone buzzes on the counter. “Hold on a minute, Ishizu’s calling.” He shifts the plate to his forearm and sets the phone on speaker, “Hey, Ishizu!”

There is an awful pause of silence, and then the voice on the other end of the line is frigid. “My brother is missing, Bakura, and I need you to tell me why.”

Bakura stops laughing.

Glass shatters and Ryou freezes with the fridge door open, jam oozing from the broken jar all over his feet. “Oh, _no_.”

“Bakura?” Malik has the phone now. “Bakura, where’s Marik?”

His blood is rushing in his ears, and Bakura doesn’t hear Ryou moving until the door slams shut. He jumps, startled, and hears footsteps pounding down the outside hallway. Bakura drops the toast. “Ryou?!”

The shitty elevator doors creak open, and Bakura throws himself into his sneakers, yanking his door open. “Ryou!” On speaker phone, Marik is screaming at him, but he can’t bring himself to care as he pounds down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.

Ryou isn’t in the lobby, or outside. Bakura hangs up on Malik, and dials a new number.

“Hello? Bakura?”

“Amane, what’s your brother’s address?”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for some Ishtar family angst.**

Not three seconds after Amane had finished rattling off her brother’s address, Malik tears around the corner on the bike, taking the turn nearly parallel to the ground, Rishid and Ishizu behind him at a slightly less breakneck speed in the car. Malik screeches to a halt, flips up his helmet visor and barks, “Address, now.”

His expression isn’t one Bakura recognizes and not one he ever wants to see pointed his way again. “Two blocks east of the university main gate, the big purple house near the entrance to the park.”

Malik peels off at a speed just under impossible and Rishid unlocks the car doors with a solid _thunk_. Bakura jumps in and Rishid pulls after Malik fast enough that the door slams shut on its own. He doesn’t bother with a seatbelt. “What the hell is going on?!”

Rishid’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel. “You’re sure Marik is there? At this house?”

“I—Probably? Ishizu, what’s happening?” Ishizu keeps her eyes fixed on the road out her window and Bakura leans forward and hisses past the headrest, “Ishizu, Ryou’s out there.”

She flinches, and hisses back, “He shouldn’t be able to leave the house.”

“You don’t fucking say?” Rishid rounds a turn so fast that two wheels rise off the pavement, and Bakura rethinks that seatbelt.

Ishizu turns around in her seat and Rishid spares them a glance through the rearview as he blows through a yellow light. Bakura is about ninety—fifty?—percent sure there aren’t police sirens rising up behind them. “You used sycamore ash?”

“Yeah, and did you know it’s apparently frowned upon to steal branches off trees in the park—”

“And you used the knife from the museum?”

_Right,_ that’s what Bakura was supposed to do. “Yeah, and I’ve been meaning to return that, I swear—”

“And used fresh blood?”

Bakura jerks his arm up for her to see and narrowly avoids slamming it into her face as Rishid brakes in time for a red light. Bakura can see the university gates just beyond the crosswalk. “It really doesn’t get fresher than this, Ishizu!” He didn’t think his response was really that witty or dramatic, but the blood drains from Ishizu’s face anyway. “Ishizu?”

“When I said fresh blood,” Ishizu says, measured and infinitely too calm in her ‘hell is empty, and all the devils are here’ voice, “I had assumed you would stop by the grocery store. Or the butcher.”

Unholy _fuck,_ he should have had her proofread his translation. “The butch—Ishizu, your instructions didn’t exactly specify that I should support my local businesses!” Bakura cracks a weak grin and out of the corner of his eye watches blue white brown green _purple_ houses blink by. “But this is fine, right? This like substituting margarine for butter, basically?”

“This,” she tells him as Rishid slams the car into park in the driveway of a house that honestly looks just too _quaint_ for this sort of freak show, and Bakura gets a great view of Malik’s booted foot cracking the front door nearly off its hinges, “is like binding a being from beyond to the mortal coil with a sack of meat and air and _feelings_ , instead of with a massive apartment complex of stable brick and steel and absolutely zero chance of anything going horribly wrong.”

Oh. “This is really not good.”

Ishizu follows Rishid up the stairs into the maw of the house. “No,” she agrees, “this is really not good.”

-

His head is pounding, he can’t get enough air into his lungs, everything _hurts._ ‘’F-Fuck.”

“More?”

_Oh._ “Please.”

-

Malik’s made quick work of the first floor by the time Bakura and Ishizu catch up to him halfway down the basement stairs. Rishid’s footsteps are heavy above them as he heads for the second story and Malik’s breathing is hard and frantic and just this side of an anxiety attack. “He’s not here, I can’t find him, he’s not fucking here—”

The basement turns out to be painfully ordinary and almost empty except for a ratty old couch bracketed by a couple of old tables and a nearly empty bookcase. There’s literally no nook or cranny to hide a body—holy shit he means a _person_ , Bakura’s reached his axe-murder quota for this lifetime—but that doesn’t stop Malik from tearing the place apart. Bakura and Ishizu watch from the stairwell and jump when Rishid comes down the stairs behind them. Malik whirls around when his brother steps into the basement proper and the _hope_ on his face is fucking excruciating to witness. Ishizu’s fingers close around Bakura’s wrist when Rishid shakes his head. “He’s not here.”

There have been, throughout his life, brief moments Bakura wished for a sibling he was actually related to, after over a decade of watching the Ishtars have secret silent conversations on some sort of frequency only blood relatives are privy to.

This was not one of them.

“What am I missing?” Bakura flinches as Malik kicks over an end-table. His heavy boot cracks the wood clean in half. “I mean, I knew Marik partied hard but is something else happening?”

“My brother,” Malik snaps, talking over his sister’s whip-crack shout of his name, “doesn’t fucking _party hard_.” He pulls at a drawer so hard its contents literally jump out. “My brother is a fucking black hole, who we’ve been treating like a functioning human being when he’s _not_ , who we’ve been coddling instead of putting in an _institution_ so he can get help—”

Bakura had known, conceptually, that everything about Rishid—his body, his personality, his voice—was _big_ , but it was something else entirely to watch him go from standing to _looming_ in half a second from three feet away. Bakura presses himself further up the stairs to avoid the wrath that isn’t even directed at him when Rishid steps up to tower over his brother and murmur, deadly-soft, “And what sort of institution were you thinking, Malik? An asylum? A jail?”

Clammy fingers dig harder into his wrist and Ishizu yanks him back up the stairs, but not before Bakura looks over his shoulder to see Malik, ashen and swaying in his brother’s shadow, and realizes this something he was not supposed to overhear.

Ishizu bundles them both back into the car and as the adrenaline wears off, it occurs to Bakura that they’ve _broken into a home in broad daylight in the middle of downtown Domino._ “Ishizu, we need to get the fuck out of here. Like, right now.”

If Ishizu hears him, she doesn’t respond, and they sit in cramped, sweaty silence until Malik storms from the house and peels away on the bike in the direction opposite the one they came. Rishid’s eye is swelling to a wonderful shade of purple by the time he climbs into the passenger seat and Ishizu waits until they’ve pulled onto the highway to skip the surface streets to say, “Malik is right.”

Rishid’s eyes snap up to meet Bakura’s in the rearview mirror, and Bakura considers the selective permeability of leather seats and how quickly he could just become one with the upholstery. “Ishizu!”

But Ishizu is still the modicum of vehicle safety and not getting splattered across an eight-lane highway, so she checks her mirrors and signals her turn as she says, “You know Marik’s not alright.”

It takes Bakura a second to figure out she’s talking to him, not Rishid. “Um, yeah?” This isn’t a trick question? “I mean, he’s always been a little bit—” _unhinged, unstable, excessive, indulgent, the stoner friend who drinks too much and parties too hard and stands too close to edges sometimes, like he’s just waiting for a breeze to make the decision for him,_ “—eccentric, but I grew up with him, y’know? I figured he was just always like that.”

Ishizu hums something noncommittal as she pulls onto their exit. “Marik has had a difficult time adjusting. To Cairo and then to Japan.” Rishid mutters something under his breath and Bakura swears the temperature drops ten degrees. Malik and Marik bickered like it was going out of style, but seeing Ishizu and Rishid at each other’s throats made him wants to barrel roll out of the car and off the nearest overpass—this entire situation set his teeth on edge.

Marik could be touchy and ridiculous and moody and difficult to reel in, but this was like finally walking across the vacant lot at the end of your neighborhood and discovering that sometimes quicksand looks like exactly concrete right up until it’s too late.

Bakura decides he’s getting really tired of getting the foundation ripped out from under him, so he leans against the window and doesn’t say anything more.

-

The bones in his wrist feel like they’re trying to crawl out from under his skin, and he can taste blood thick and sweet when he licks the back of his teeth. “I should probably call my brother.”

Slim fingers run through his hair and he leans into the grasp, presses a coppery kiss to the inside of a pale wrist. If he didn’t know better, he’d think there wasn’t a pulse at all under his lips. “Hm, he’ll probably ask you where you are. Or he’ll ask you to come home.” The slim fingers run from his hair to skim across his cheekbones and tilt his face up. “Do you want that?”

He leans forward to kiss at that smile. No, he didn’t.

-

Bakura decides that he loves Ishizu best of all the Ishtars when she pours herself a massive glass of wine immediately upon getting home, and then passes the rest of the bottle off to Bakura instead of Rishid. The bike was parked when they had returned but the house was silent and the doors to both Marik and Malik’s rooms were closed. Bakura isn’t entirely keen on going upstairs to play “what’s behind door #1” with any more Ishtar siblings, so he parks it on a chair by the kitchen island and awkwardly doesn’t make eye contact with anyone.

It’s another five minutes before he remembers his phone in his pocket, and morbid curiosity compels him to check it for messages—he’s not certain if he’s hoping for a message from the actually dead kid or the hopefully not dead kid when he thumbs in the pass-code, but his inbox is empty regardless. Bakura takes a very, very long drink of the bottle of wine. He only chokes a little bit when Rishid speaks suddenly, halfway through Bakura’s swallow, “I’m sorry you got involved in this.”

The way Ishizu is watching him can really only be described as _sphinx-like_ , and Bakura clears his throat. “What? No, Rishid, it’s fine. We’re family.” Bakura’s still not _entirely_ sure how he ended up in the Ishtars’ care after his mother died instead of the actual foster care system, especially considering their mother had already returned to Egypt by then, but he can say with minimally misty eyes and general sappiness that they’re the only family he’s really ever known. “And family races across town and trashes creepy pervert houses together to hunt down family members who can’t be assed to fucking call.” That was maybe more sappy than he had intended, and Bakura flushes and ducks his head. “Or so I’m told.”

It’s perhaps because Rishid doesn’t really respond that Bakura decides to press his luck—families have uncomfortable conversations about missing parents, right? That’s a thing? “You know,” he says, conversationally, cautiously, “I know your mom moved back to Egypt, but I don’t think any of you ever mentioned anything about your father. Like, ever.”

Bakura jumps when the stem of Ishizu’s glass shatters under the grip of her fingers, and wine sloshes across the kitchen island.

Okay, so that’s not exactly the reaction he was expecting.

Rishid sets a hand on her shoulder, gently. “It’s not something we talk about.”

“I don’t see why not!” Malik comes around the corner like a fucking livewire, and Bakura has heard this tone of voice, this poisonous glee, from another Ishtar brother enough times to know he was about to regret asking. As dark as Bakura ever thought Marik could be, clearly Malik has the mania to match, and from the way Malik locks eyes on Rishid and just _keeps smiling_ Bakura realizes this is payback for whatever was said at the house earlier. “Y’see, we had a bit of a bumpier transition than your mother did, Bakura. We’d just gotten into Cairo and our neighbor loaned us a gun because he was worried—folks from the boonies, barely speak Arabic, rough part of town, we’re easy targets, right? He said maybe Rishid could take it when he walked Ishizu to work, because no one fucks around with armed teenagers! It’s a dangerous world and Ishizu looked just like his daughter and he was worried about us, and _shit_ wasn’t he just the sweetest guy? We’d been in the city a month; we’d never even _seen_ a gun before. None of us even knew how it fucking _worked_.”

Malik pauses, pulls a water bottle out of the fridge, and turns back around. “So one day, Dad’s beating Mum, right? Rishid gets involved so Dad rips him a new one, literally, punches a bullet right through his arm. God, there was blood everywhere. And I’m a little shit, think I can do better right up until Dad cracks me across face so hard I go flying—this part of my jaw is solid titanium now, I’ll bet you didn’t know that—and somehow, Marik ends up with the gun in his hands and he pulls the trigger by accident. Splatters Dad’s brains _all_ across the kitchen ceiling, and that was that.” Malik shrugs. “Well, except for the part where we dragged his body into the desert, but boy aren’t we fucking _lucky_ that Japan doesn’t have extradition treaties with Egypt? The only thing we have to worry about is that we abandoned a man without any burial rights to the fucking sand, but there’s no way _that’s_ coming back to haunt us right now!”

Malik turns away from Rishid and Bakura’s too focused on his cracked open grin to notice Malik’s now _right next to him_ until he stage whispers—conspiratorially, like he’s not the only one speaking, like every brick in this goddamn building isn’t straining to rip away from its mortar to escape what he’s about to say—“But the best part is, after Marik realized what he’d done, he put the gun to his _own_ head.” He traces a line from the edge of his cheekbone to the crown of his head. “Still got the scar. Real lucky thing his itty-bitty little arms couldn’t deal with the recoil or that’d have been two bodies to stuff into my bedding and drag out beyond the desert.”

Ishizu moves faster than Rishid can grab her. Glass is breaking against the fridge and Malik’s cheek is sliced open and oozing blood before Bakura even processes what’s happened. Ishizu is rigid, wrist in her brother’s grip, with a voice to match. “Watch your mouth.”

Malik doesn’t say a goddamn word.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _ah, right in the family feels_

Rishid makes dinner on autopilot, and it isn’t until they’re all sitting around the kitchen table picking at their food that Malik gestures to the entryway with his fork and says, “So, is this like an elephant in the room thing, where we’re not supposed to talk about it?”

Bakura’s head snaps up and he’s up and smothering Ryou to his chest before his brain can catch up with the rest of him. “Ryou! Oh my God, Ryou.”

Muffled by shirt, Ryou manages, “You knew?”

Malik stabs at a radish with a chopstick but doesn’t eat it. He’s not looking at any of them. “I’ve seen my fair share of horror movies; I know how this shit works.” The ends of his chopsticks jerk towards his siblings. “You both knew, too.”

Ryou’s arms wrap around Bakura’s waist and squeeze, and Bakura remembers to let go. “Where the _hell_ have you been?”

“I thought I could find them.” Ryou stares down at his bare feet. “But I only got as far as the university before I realized I didn’t know where my family is now. So I started for the museum, and then—then I couldn’t?” He runs a hand through his bangs. “I couldn’t move in that direction.”

“This apartment is the opposite direction of the university and the museum.” Ishizu straightens against the back of her chair. “You have limits.”

Malik barks out a laugh, harsh. “Great, a ghost on a leash.” He tosses down his chopsticks and picks up his plate as he stands up from the table. “Fucking ridiculous.”

Ryou takes a step to the side so Bakura stands between him and Malik. Bakura reaches a hand back and wraps his fingers around Ryou’s wrist. “What is your problem?”

Malik steps away from them, backing himself into the doorway to the kitchen and leaning against the wall. He rubs a hand across his face and he looks angry and _tired_. “My problem? My problem is that my brother is _gone_ and it’s your boyfriend’s fault!”

“That’s—”

“Bullshit?” Malik rounds on Ryou and the gaze of the Ishtar family on them makes Bakura cringe. “No, see, he took off because he _knew_ something.” Ryou’s hand slips from Bakura’s grasp. “You were already gone when we got to Bakura’s. You already knew who to look for.”

Bakura turns, slowly. Ryou shrinks from him. “You did.”

Ryou takes another step back. “It was a hunch. I just—I saw how they were _looking_ at each other! And then I saw that Marik didn’t even wipe the phone number off his hand.” One hand traced the scar on his neck. Bakura just stands there. “Marik is my brother’s type.”

Malik grins like he’s won something. He looks feral. “Oh? What is your brother’s type, actually?”

Ryou hesitates.

Rishid turns to face them fully. “Well?” The Ishtar family knows what the answer is. They’re just waiting to hear it.

“Damaged.” Ryou clears his throat, looks up, and says it again. Louder. “He likes damaged people. He likes to make them worse.” Rishid buries his face in his hands and Malik turns away from them to step into the kitchen. Ryou pulls away from Bakura’s side and follows him. “It’s not my fault your brother is the kind of person who says ‘more, please’ when someone hurts him!” he hurls at Malik’s back as he puts dishes into the sink. For a long moment, there’s nothing but the sound of ceramic clinking together and the slide of skin on tile as Malik spins on his heel to face Ryou, face alarmingly neutral in a way that makes Bakura tense. “And it’s certainly not my fault my brother’s the kind of person who would hurt him if he asked.”

Malik doesn’t say anything; just looks at them both with an inscrutable expression that Bakura knows from experience could devolve into either violence or sobbing. Bakura grabs Ryou again and pulls him out of the room. When he speaks, he’s looking at Ishizu. “We’re going to go, okay? I just—” Bakura clears his throat, and this time he looks Malik in the eye. “We’ll find him. I swear, we’re going to find him.”

Ishizu and Rishid don’t respond and Malik just shrugs and Bakura doesn’t look back until he’s already out the door.

-

An uncomfortable silence hangs between them until they step into the subway and Ryou says, “We need to find my family.” He looks at Bakura expectantly, but doesn’t elaborate.

Bakura splutters for a moment before he remembers. “Amane.”

Ryou leans against the wall, hair flying as a train rumbles by. “Do you know where she is?”

“Yeah, I walked her home that day she was spying on us. I remember where she lives—it’s at the end of this line, actually.” Bakura makes a face. “That’s really not as creepy as it sounded.”

Ryou hums something under his breath. “We should start there, then. If my brother’s not at the house, then she probably at least knows where he is.” He pushes away from the wall and steps up to the line to wait for the next train, heedless of the people crowding around him.

Bakura frowns, concerned. He steps up behind Ryou to slide his arms around his waist but thinks better of it at the last moment. There’s something in the tone of Ryou’s voice that makes him worry. “You don’t have to come with me, you know. I can do this by myself, you don’t have to see them if you—”

“Bakura,” Ryou cuts him off, voice measured and entirely too calm, “it’s fine. This is my fault, after all.”

The subway trip is spent in silence, Bakura alternating between drafting reasons why that is _hogshit_ to recite to Ryou as soon as they were clear or all these people and planning ways to throttle Malik for suggesting it in the first place, but even after the subway doors had opened and they’d climbed the stairs back to the surface, Bakura keeps quiet and leads them down the right street without saying a word. Amane’s house is just as he remembered it, down to the blue shutters and the quaint porch, but Ryou walks up the steps like an automaton, reaching for a loose brick and pulling a key out from the back of it like it was waiting for him all this time. “Our spare key for the apartment was hidden just like this one, right out by the mailboxes,” he says by way of explanation, and then lets them both in.

“Ryou!” Bakura hisses as the door swings open smoothly, “Are you out of your fucking mind?!”

“It’s the middle of the day; my father is at work and Amane should be at school.” Ryou slips the door shut behind them and pockets the key. “We can find what we need and get out before anyone gets home.” He turns to smile at Bakura, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “You can stay here if you want to.”

Bakura decides it probably _is_ best that he stay in the entryway instead of breaking his home-invasion record twice in the same day, and leans against the wall as Ryou brushes past him. There’s an ornamental mirror hung on the side of the staircase to his right, and he realizes he can still see Ryou in it as he rounds the doorway to their left into the—the living room? Bakura sees a couch and the corner of a TV just beyond where Ryou is standing. The house is silent around them and Bakura lets himself relax just a fraction.

“Ryou?”

Ryou freezes stock-still in the living room, and Bakura flattens himself against the wall until the ridges of his spine dig painfully into the plaster. From the angle of the entryway mirror, he can see a man sitting on a _second_ couch, just barely out of view unless he cranes his neck, holding a glass of whiskey.

Fuck.

Ryou takes a deep breath and straightens. “Hello, Father.”

Double fuck.

Ryou’s father adjusts his glasses and looks his dead son up and down. Finally, “Is that jam on your feet? Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

“Y-You’ve had too much to drink.” From his hiding spot, Bakura can see Ryou shaking. “I’m not really here.”

“Oh.” The man leans back, staring into his glass. “I see.”

“I’m sorry.”

A sigh. “I miss you.”

Bakura is _really_ running out of fucks here.

“Father,” Ryou steps forward, placating, “I need to know if you know where my brother is.”

The silence as Ryou’s father considers the question is agonizing. “I haven’t seen him in a while, come to think of it.” He gestures with his glass, rueful smile on his face. “But you know what your brother is like. Him and his peculiar habits. He was such a strange child.”

“I know exactly what he’s like, Father.” Ryou turns just a bit, and Bakura can see how strained his smile is. “That’s why I need to find him. Right now.”

“He adores Amane, though.”

Ryou flinches, but doesn’t say anything.

“Hey, someone was calling for you today! I tried to get through to you, but your phone went straight to voice—did you _bleach_ your hair?”

Ryou and his father both jump as Amane rounds the corner from the kitchen into the living room and Bakura thanks whatever lucky stars he has on loan that she didn’t come through what he now realizes is the kitchen doorway right down the hall from his hiding spot. Amane scowls at Ryou. Bakura holds his breath. “You look ridiculous, honestly, like you’re twelve. Did you find your kid photos and get nostalgic? Dad’s hair got darker as he got old, too, but you don’t see him having a midlife crisis.”

After a pause, Ryou’s shocked expression cracks open and he laughs. Amane looks even more thunderous, and Ryou backpedals. “Sorry, sorry. You were saying someone called? Called me?”

“No.” Amane takes a step forward to peer at him and Ryou takes a step back. “Someone called _me_ , asking for _you_. Are you okay?”

Ryou rubs a hand over his face if only to keep his sister from peering too closely and Bakura wants to grab him and make a run for it. Amane is whip-smart and Ryou doesn’t have the sharp angles of his brother’s older face, and she’s bound to notice any second now. “I’m a bit hungover, actually, sorry. I don’t really remember last night too well.”

Amane snorts. “Wow, you and that guy really did have fun. You came here before that date of yours to get the folder you left here on Monday, and then you—”

Bakura sees the moment she realizes she’s speaking to an imposter. Amane’s eyes flit over Ryou’s shoulder to the doorway, and she’s at just the right angle to meet Bakura’s eyes in the mirror. He slides to floor and waits for it all to come crashing down.

Intead: “You really _are_ hungover. Dad, you’re a terrible example! Look at your son, he’s practically a vagrant!”

Ryou laughs again like it’s been kicked out of him and Bakura can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You’re far too smart for your own good,” Ryou tells her. “Did I tell you where I was going after the date?”

“I don’t think so,” Bakura straightens until he can see them again, “But you usually head to your workshop most nights.”

“My workshop.”

Amane shoots Ryou a pointed look while their father watches, befuddled and tipsy. “Yeah. Your workshop. The loft by the stadium. On the other end of town. Big green building?”

“Oh! Right! My workshop at the top of the big green building, near the stadium, across town. Of course.” Ryou glances at his father again, then out into the hallway where Bakura is hiding. “I should probably get going. There. To my workshop.”

Amane cuts in front of him and steps into the hallway. “I’ll go with you to the door.”

Bakura and Ryou are just stepping onto the porch when Amane leans over the welcome mat. “I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I expect a phone call explaining _everything_.” The look on her face doesn’t allow for dissent, and Bakura thinks he’s been scared of the wrong sibling this whole time. She fixes her gaze on Ryou. “You’re my brother? The other one?”

_The dead one?_ “Yes.”

Ryou’s almost knocked into Bakura as Amane steps forward and throws her arms around his waist. Her voice is muffled in his shirt. “I wish you could stay.” She pulls away, and her expression is shuttered. For a moment, she looks so much older than thirteen. “I know what he’s like, Ryou. He’s not like that with me.” Her fingers dig into the doorframe. “It doesn’t stop me loving him.”

“It didn’t stop me, either.”

“He’s my brother. A good brother,” she says, like that explains everything.

Ryou nods. “I know.”

Amane steps back across the threshold and grips the doorknob. “You should go.” The door is half-shut before she murmurs, “I’m sorry about Mom.”

Bakura notices Ryou’s nails digging into his palm so hard it must hurt, and he pulls Ryou’s hand into his, lacing their fingers together and feeling Ryou’s nails bite into his knuckles. He clears his throat. “If you see my friend, you call me. Okay, Amane?”

“Okay.” She shuts the door.

Ryou makes it halfway down the street before he mumbles, “She looks like Mum,” and drops to the sidewalk to cry.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **damn, y!bakura, back at it again with the psychological torture and menacing shadow magic! (that's how you use that meme, right?)**

The workshop across town turns out to be in a snazzy building with a security system that could make Seto Kaiba turn green and choke, and a doorman who probably moonlit as a club bouncer or a mafia hitman. Bakura can feel his pulse pounding in his temples as he and Ryou step off the bus and cross the street back to the Ishtar home. Ryou is silent as the grave next to him and the thought alone makes hysterical giggles fight their way up Bakura’s throat.

He clears it instead as he opens the door and lets them in. “Are you okay?”

Ryou’s eyes flick up for a moment. “Yeah.” He traces the crescents his nails left in his palm from where Bakura couldn’t pry his hands apart on the bus ride back. He kicks off his shoes and keeps his eyes fixed on the staircase. “I’m, um, I’m going to talk to Ishizu? If that’s alright?”

Bakura swallows down _no it’s not fucking talk to me Ryou please—_ “Sure. Sure, yeah. Her bedroom’s the furthest one down the hall on the left, up the stairs.”

The bottom floor is quiet enough that Bakura suspects everyone retreated to their own rooms, so he flinches like a gunshot when he steps into the living room to find Malik sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. Bakura wavers in the doorway for a moment. “I’m sorry, I can go—”

“Shut up and sit down.”

Bakura plants his ass on the very edge of the couch, takes in the tense lines of Malik’s back. “Malik, I’m so sorry, we tried—we went to his family’s house but he wasn’t there and there was this loft but we couldn’t get in—”

“Please stop talking.” Malik has yet to look up at him, to move at all. Bakura isn’t entirely sure how long they sit there, stilted and silent and awful, before Malik mumbles, “I’m sorry I yelled at your boyfriend.”

“Oh, um, it’s okay.” Bakura pauses, frowns, changes his mind. “Actually, no, it’s not okay at all! That was super shitty, you asshole!”

Malik looks up at him and something in Bakura’s chest unclenches when he realizes Malik is smiling. “Hey, I’m not the one with the psychotic, torture-happy murderer in the family.” He stops and cringes. “Oh wait.”

It punches a laugh out of Bakura and Malik laughs with him, both of them dissolving into tears and helpless giggles every time they glance at each other, both at wit’s end to do anything but laugh. Malik slides off the couch completely, hands slapped over his mouth, which starts Bakura cackling again until he topples off the couch himself. With a groan, Malik runs his hands through his hair and shakes his head. “What the fuck are we going to do, Bakura? My stupid fucking brother is fucking missing!”

“A-Actually,” They whip around to look at Ryou leaning in the doorway, face drawn and pale, “he’s upstairs. He just—the door to his room was open and I just saw him climb the fire escape in—”

Ryou moves out of the way just as Malik tears out of the room, taking the stairs two at a time with everyone on his heels. Bakura hits the landing just as Rishid steps out of Ishizu’s bedroom with his sister, and Malik nearly runs into his brother coming out of the bathroom with a towel slung around his neck.

Marik looks straight at Bakura as Malik throws his arms around his brother’s neck. His cheek is scraped and his lip is split, and Bakura doesn’t want to know why Marik elected to wear long sleeves during the city’s heat wave. A shirt that isn’t even his. Marik reaches up to pat his brother’s back, movements ginger and favoring his right hand.

Ishizu hangs back even after Malik has released his twin. Like Bakura, she’s noticed the state her brother is in. “Where were you?”

Marik looks at them all for a long moment, then sighs, deep and put-out like he hasn’t been missing for two days. “I’m going to sleep.”

Malik’s relief sours to outrage. “Marik—”

“Malik.” Marik turns to head into his room. “I’m going to sleep.”

“No!” Malik grabs Marik’s arm and whips him around so hard that Marik hisses through clenched teeth. “What the _hell_ happened? Where the _hell_ were you?” For the first time, he gets a good look at his twin’s face, his shirt, the way he cradles his right wrist in his other hand. “What did he do to you?”

Marik’s expression is almost nostalgic, and Bakura can feel Ryou’s grip on the back of his shirt. “Not a single thing I didn’t want him to.” Bile rises in Bakura’s throat, because hey, he’s as kinky as the next guy but Marik’s eyes are glazed in a way that makes his skin crawl. Marik traces the cut across his brother’s cheek. “What happened?”

“Accident in the kitchen,” Malik and Rishid say at the same time. Bakura cringes because, wow, that didn’t sound rehearsed at all.

Marik looks over his brothers, straight at Ishizu. “This family is in the habit of having accidents.” His hand slides away from Malik’s cheek. “I don’t think it will scar.”

And then Marik shuts the door in his brother’s face.

-

“Marik, let me in.”

Silence.

“Marik, I swear to God.”

The door looms over him like the aforementioned god and refuses to budge. Bakura drops his head against the wood, the dull pain a counterpoint to the pounding already in his head. “Look, I brought you ice and food, you jackass, unless going on hunger strikes is a kink of yours I didn’t know about.”

The lock finally clicks under his palm and Marik pulls the door open. “It’s not.”

Two days’ worth of worry and frustration and blatant, unadulterated panic translates itself into Bakura hurling a granola bar full-force at the back of Marik’s head, and his vision whites out with sheer fury momentarily when Marik catches it without even turning around. Bakura kicks the door shut behind him, hears the lock engage automatically, and brandishes the ice and tape. “Give me your fucking hand, you piece of shit.”

Marik sinks onto the mattress and shoves the comforter out of the way. “Careful, darling. If you’re rough with me you might hurt my feelings.”

The pattern of bruises ringing Marik’s neck hits the light from the window just right and coalesces into the shape of a _handprint,_ and the ground tilts nauseatingly under Bakura’s feet, sucking away his snarky reply. He sits down on the bed, hard, and says instead, “You, uh, you had a fun weekend.”

Marik crosses his legs and makes space for Bakura on the bed before holding out his arm. “You’re mad.”

Bakura chokes on what could either have been a mad-scientist caliber laugh or an ear-splitting shriek in the general direction of the abyss, total toss-up, and slaps the ice pack down on Marik’s wrist harder than he probably should. “I do not possess the _words_ ,” he tells Marik, “in the one-and-a-quarter languages I speak to properly express the sheer, unplumbed, dark-and-twisty depths of my rage at this exact moment in time, but _yes_ , you could say that I’m _mad_.”

Marik looks at him through lidded eyes as Bakura tapes the ice pack to his skin and cracks a lopsided grin. “There’s no need to be self-deprecating, I’d say your Egyptian puts you at one and a half languages, easily.”

Bakura sits very still, tape in hand, until the urge to commit homicide passes. “Marik, are you _fucking_ kidding—”

“You know.”

Okay, so they weren’t just going to ease into this conversation or, you know, _never ever ever have it._ Bakura finishes with Marik’s wrist but doesn’t let go. “Yeah. Malik told me.” He pauses. “He was really pissed and it was really shitty of him to do it like that, I’m sorry—”

Marik leans back against the wall and his hand slips from Bakura’s. “It’s fine. I’m glad you know.” He grins, wider this time, and Bakura can see it. At the edge of his cheekbone and curling up into his hairline, the beginning of a scar. Like he can tell Bakura’s looking, Marik runs a hand through his hair. “I should have called you.”

“Yeah, you should’ve.”

“I didn’t want to.” Marik tilts his head back against the wall. “I think that may be the problem.”

Bakura leans against the wall, knocks his shoulder into Marik’s. “You okay?”

Marik’s hand slips from his hair to rest across his eyes and he grimaces, “Would you believe I feel better than I have in ages?”

“That’s what I’m worried about.” Bakura scowls. “I told you not to call him. I told you he was creepy and bad news and you are such an _idiot_ , goddamnit Marik!”

Marik bumps their shoulders again and doesn’t respond for a long while. Eventually, he drops his hand from his face and chuckles. “So, Ryou’s cute.”

All the blood that was pulsing in angry circuits around his body beelines for his face and Bakura splutters. “Okay, _no_ , that was the worst segue ever and we are so _not_ talking about my relationships, o-or my _sex_ life—”

“Would you rather hear more about mine?”

Bakura scrubs a hand across his violently red face. “Yeah, Ryou’s fucking adorable.”

Marik bumps his shoulder again and says, “Ishizu owes me a serious amount of cash, just so you know. She swore three ways to Sunday that she wouldn’t get involved.”

“Did literally _everyone_ know that my house was haunted?” Bakura asks, incredibly aware that this is not the first time he’s asked that question.

A shrug. “Hey, that ‘juju shit’ you’re always disparaging has its strong points.”

“So I’m learning,” Bakura grumbles. He leans his head against Marik’s shoulder. “What are you going to tell Malik?”

His friend sucks a breath through his teeth and lets it out in an amused huff. “Talk about terrible segues, Bakura.”

“Okay, bad diversion tactic quota has been reached, got it.” Bakura jabs Marik’s knee with a finger. “Doesn’t answer my question.”

Marik pokes Bakura back and chuckles, sheepish. “Honestly, I was hoping you would go down there and get a head-start on him before I tried.”

In retrospect, Bakura only feels a little bad for grabbing the pillow and waling on Marik, at least until Marik retaliates with equal force and twice the enthusiasm. It isn’t until Bakura hears the lock click behind him that he realizes Marik’s pillow-fought him out of the room. “Asshole!” he yells and pretends not to hear the resulting cackle from inside the bedroom, and turns on his heel to run straight into Ryou. “Fuck! Ryou, you scared me half to death!”

Ryou lets Bakura splutter over his choice of words for an awkward minute before sliding their hands together and leaning his head against Bakura’s shoulder. His voice is muffled by shirt when he asks, “How did it go?”

Bakura sighs and feels Ryou’s hair brush against his cheek. “Good, I think. Marik seems fine—well, relatively, I guess.” He clears his throat. “How’s, uh, how’s Malik?”

Ryou doesn’t say anything, and in the silence Bakura can hear angry shouting from downstairs and picks up a few new choice Egyptian words for his eavesdropping. “Not as well,” Ryou summarizes.

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Ryou shakes his head and slips his arms around Bakura’s waist. “Well, he did spend the last hour pounding on that door.”

Bakura remembers that vividly, mostly because he spent that same hour sitting on the second story landing and watching Malik attempt to break his brother’s door down. “We need to get to him before Malik does, or this won’t end well.”

Ryou looks up. “You just talked to Marik.”

“I meant your brother.”

Something in Ryou’s expression shutters and Bakura regrets opening his big mouth. “Yes, I suppose we do.” He pulls away from Bakura and grabs his hand to pull him down the stairs. “I think we should try that house first, before we go back to the loft.”

Bakura frowns, about to comment on Ryou’s absolute and total calm in the face of heading to _confront his whackjob brother about kidnapping and torturing his boyfriend’s friend,_ when the door behind them creaks open and Marik sticks his head out. “If you’d like to get out of the house alive, might I suggest a back door?”

-

The neighborhood looks insultingly idyllic in the fading sunlight, all streetlights and cozy homes and lights on in the living rooms, so up to the eyeballs with normalcy that Bakura wants to gag as he and Ryou make their way up the street as inconspicuously as possible. The house looks as simple and adorable as the rest of the neighborhood, if not for the skid marks in the driveway. And the wood splinters all over the stairs. And the missing doorknob.

Bakura grimaces. This may be more difficult than they expected.

A cold hand wraps around his wrist and jerks him to a halt just before Bakura starts up the stairs. The expression on Ryou’s face in the half-light is concerning. “What?”

Ryou frowns and glances up at the door and back to Bakura. “Maybe you should wait out here while I talk to him.”

It takes Bakura a moment to process that particular set of words in that particular order. “Ryou, are you out of your fucking mind? There’s a snowball’s chance in hell I’m letting you go in there alone!” Grumbling, he adds, quieter, “Punk was literally murdered and thinks splitting up is a good fucking plan, have you ever even _watched_ a horror movie, fuck’s sake Ryou.”

The frown doesn’t budge, not even a twitch of the lips. Ryou squeezes his wrist again before letting go. “Okay. Fine. Just, let me go first? And let me talk to him.”

“Ryou,” Bakura scowls, “I don’t understand why exactly this is such a big—”

The front door creaks open all on its own and the porch light flickers on. The wooden splinters all tremble and jerk over to one side of the stairs.

Bakura is startled a step back. “Oh fuck.” From the depths of the house something appears to move, too low and sinuous to be human. “I take it he’s mad?”

“No,” Ryou tells him. “He’s amused.”

“This is honestly more magic-y magic than I was ready to believe in, Ryou.”

“Look me in my dead face and say that again.”

Bakura chuckles at that, can’t help himself, and looks away from the door at Ryou. “But you’re like, magic-ier, right? Or as powerful as him?”

Ryou’s face goes sheetrock white and a voice from the top of the stairs says, “No, he’s not.”

In the time it takes Bakura to look back at the house, he’s cursed himself left, right, and backwards for breaking the cardinal rule of _surviving the night in a horror movie._ Ryou’s brother doesn’t look mad at all, standing in his doorway and looking down on them with a smile. It makes Bakura’s skin crawl. “What the hell did you do to Marik?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” He brings his hand up to check his nails like a literal Bond villain and the shadows in the house twist and roil. “I was sure to call him a cab to take him home.”

“Are you fuck—” Ryou’s nails dig into his wrist, and Bakura dimly remembers agreeing to let him do the talking. But Bakura’s so fucking _pissed_ and Ryou’s brother looks so fucking _smug_ —Bakura takes a deep breath. “Yeah, he got home.”

“Then I don’t see what this is about.”

Okay, yeah, Ryou’s grip is probably going to fracture his wrist but Bakura can’t help himself. “What this is _about?_ This is about you brainwashing my friend and fucking him up and sending him home like fucking leftovers! It’s fucking called abuse, or-or _kidnapping_ —”

“No, actually,” Ryou’s brother cuts in, “what this is called is breaking and entering.” He leans against his shattered doorway, and the shadows part so Bakura can see just past him to his ruined hallway and broken coffee table. He’s got a point. “It’s probably also called attempted burglary, harassment, most likely a hate crime since half the neighbors saw me coming home with my lovely, _male_ date, and honestly just being an all-around terrible tenant considering how cheap your rent is.” Bakura opens his mouth to reply; a raised hand stops him. “My lovely neighbors, by the way, also called to tell me exactly who stopped over while I was away from home, down to the vehicle license plates.” He shakes his head like he’s chagrined instead of fucking enjoying himself. “I certainly hope the Ishtar family has their immigration paperwork in order, given the certain level of model behavior Japan expects of its naturalized citizens.”

Bakura tosses a quick glance around the street and sees several sets of curtains snap shut as his gaze slides past them. Fucking busybodies. “They’re not going to find the body in the fucking _desert_ , you asshole.”

God, you could just cut yourself on that smile, and Bakura realizes that he’s fucked up something awful. “My, I was referring to the copious amounts of illegal substances Marik is keeping in his home, but a _body,_ ” and fuck, could he just say that any louder, the scowling grandmother loitering by her trashcans at the end of the street probably couldn’t hear them, “that sounds like something we should really report to the authorities.”

Bakura bites the inside of his cheek until he can taste blood. There’s no way he’s going to win this, so he takes a step back onto the sidewalk, puts his hands up. “Okay. Okay, fine. We’re going. Ryou, come on.” He’s a couple of steps away from the house when he notices no one is following him. Bakura looks back over his shoulder. “Ryou?”

“I can’t. I _can’t_.” Ryou stands just out of reach on the front steps like he’s pinned there. “Bakura, I don’t know what’s going on; I can’t get out of this house.” Bakura can see it on his face: this is his waking nightmare all over again, trapped alone in a house with a monster and this time he can’t even vanish, Bakura’s pinned him to a prison of flesh and bone—Ryou whips around to look at his twin. “ _Please_.”

It’s the first time Bakura has seen Ryou’s brother frown. He looks as puzzled as they are. “I’m not doing anything.”

“The hell you’re not!” A trashcan lid rattles up the street and Bakura rethinks his step forward. Realizes what this looks like, a brown kid looming in front of the house of a neighbor who’s probably just so fucking _friendly_ and threatening him and his younger cousin? Brother? There’s no way they’re not related and Bakura’s the odd man out here. “Look, I’m sorry, I really am. We’ll go and we won’t come back and I’ll keep Malik the hell away from here and I’ll fucking move, I swear to God, just please stop. Please let him go.”

“Are you deaf?” he snaps, “I’m not doing anything.” Ryou’s brother considers the both of them for a second before waving his brother over. “Ryou, come here, give me your hand,” and Ryou _goes_ , Bakura watches him climb back up the steps like he’s been hypnotized. This isn’t magic like Ishizu’s spells or Ryou’s sigils, this is the power that comes with knowing that when you speak you’ll be _obeyed_ ; Bakura is out of his league, his depth, he’s not treading water so much as trying not to swallow as he’s dragged down and he just stares as Ryou’s hand passes through his brother’s like he wasn’t _solid_ just the second before—“Isn’t this just _fascinating_?”

“That’s,” Bakura stops, clears his throat, ignores the way Ryou is looking at him like Bakura can _fix_ this, “that’s not supposed to happen.”

“No, I imagine it’s not.” He waves Ryou away and slides one leg across the threshold of his house, and this time Ryou makes it as far as a foot away from the steps before jerking to a halt. His brother’s face splits into a lazy smile. “It makes sense, I suppose. We’re identical, the same blood and bone. I’m more his home than brick and mortar could ever be.”

His chest is too tight, Bakura is just scrambling for the air to say something when from behind him, “Is everything alright?”

He jerks away too hard and lands on his ass, sees Ryou move to help him before freezing just out of reach. Ryou’s brother turns his smile on the little old lady who’s made her way up to them and she smiles back, so incredibly _unaware_ —

The moment of silence stretches a beat too long and goes sour. The geriatric bat passes a cursory glance over Bakura in a way he is far too familiar with and continues, “I saw the commotion and came over to see if you were alright, what with everything that’s happened. I could call the police if you’d like?”

It’s Ryou who speaks over the start of whatever his brother is going to say, and while he’s addressing the nosy old hag his eyes are fixed on Bakura. “No, no it’s fine. My friend was _just going._ ”

What else can he do? Bakura stands and brushes the grit off his jeans, doesn’t look at anyone but Ryou when he says, “Yeah, I was.” His gaze slides up to Ryou’s brother when he adds, “I’ll be seeing you around.”

If anything, Ryou’s brother looks more pleased. “I’m looking forward to it.”

-

Bakura’s made it around one whole street corner when his knees give out and he sags against the brick of someone’s fence. He’s fumbling for his phone before he even really processes doing it, too preoccupied with the way his head is swimming from the stress and anxiety and _what the fuck just happened_ —

He hears the click as the call connects and the dams break before Malik’s even said hello. “Malik? Malik, I don’t know what to do, we went back to that house and Ryou is trapped and I don’t know what happened—Ishizu never mentioned anything like this and he’s stuck, Malik, he’s stuck with that psychopath and you saw Marik and what he did to him and I don’t know what to _do_ —”

“Bakura?” Something scrabbles over the receiver on Malik’s end, and is that another person talking? “Bakura, are you at that house?”

“Y-Yeah, but—”

“Take the left here!” Malik tells someone, and Bakura pulls his phone away from his ear just as a sleek back sedan peels around the corner and head straight for him. The car stops about a foot away from him, just close enough not to blind him with the headlights, and whirs softly as the sunroof slides open and a familiar face pops up and waves.

“Mokuba?” A second person rises through the sunroof, and Bakura’s jaw drops. “Malik?”

The door closest to him slides open, and Seto leans out. “Get in the car. We’re going to Egypt.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _all caught up and now, on to new things! as always, let us know what you think!_

Bakura takes a step towards the car idling next to him. Reconsiders. Re-reconsiders, and slides into the seat next to the Kaiba brothers. “What, like right now?”

Seto rolls his eyes so far back into his head that Bakura wants to engrave him a medal for it right now, if he doesn’t already have one. “Yes, this is my flying car prototype, as soon as we hit ninety on the highway—no, you twat, not right now—”

Mokuba sprawls into his brother’s lap and slaps a hand over his mouth in a way that only a younger sibling can. “Seto, you’re being rude.” He rolls over to look at Bakura. “Ishizu wants us to stop by your house for you to get some stuff first. And then Egypt. I mean, she was going there for work anyway, but now we’re going with her.”

This is making less sense the longer Bakura listens and going to _Egypt_ , being within a thousand miles of his _relatives_ , was on the very top of a long list of things Bakura would rather eat nails for breakfast than do. _“Why?”_

“We’re fighting fire with fire. Or, well, fighting witchcraft with Egyptology, I guess.” Malik makes a face. “That sounds like a good joke: so a Druid and a pharaoh get in a fistfight—”

Bakura throws his hands up. “Yeah, but how did you _know?_ ”

Malik stops short and his smile vanishes. “Ryou told Ishizu that his family is old Craft folk, and that his brother was a twin, not just a brother. And then you two _snuck out of the house_ ,” he shoots Bakura a pointed look and Bakura has enough processing power left to look chagrined, “and she told us to go after you because she was worried.”

Bakura’s not entirely sure how the driver knows where he lives (and isn’t entirely sure he _wants_ to know) but his heartbeat is starting to slow as his apartment appears around the corner. Nobody really discusses Ishizu’s uncanny ability to be right about things, except to gripe about how she was always right all the goddamn time. “Yeah, and she was right. I really fucked up.”

“Bakura, I don’t think—”

“No,” Bakura tells him, “I fucked up. I did the spell wrong and that’s why this happened.” He buries his head in his hands. “I really fucked up.”

“Yes, alright, you fucked up.” Seto’s acerbic tone jerks Bakura upright. “Are you going to sit here and whine about it until I get fed up enough to kick you to the curb, or are you going to get your things and go fix it?”

Mokuba rolls off his brother’s lap to join Malik and Bakura in gaping at his brother. Bakura blinks, startled. “Did you just give me a _pep talk?_ ”

“ _This_ close to the curb, Bakura.”

Malik pulls him out of the car before Bakura can respond, and follows close behind as Bakura leads him up the stairs and back to his apartment. Before he even gets his key in the door he can smell something strong and cloying, but it isn’t until he steps in that he figures out it’s the jar of jam still shattered on the floor. Just beyond it, he can see what’s left of the toast he dropped two days ago, most of it already carried off by mice or roaches or whatever. Bakura wavers for a moment in the doorway, unsure if he should start cleaning or go get his things. Malik’s hand settles on his shoulder and gives him a small push. “I’ll take care of it.”

Bakura thinks he mumbles something close to “thank you” and stumbles down the hallway. His backpack is still where he left it days ago, under the maelstrom of clothing tossed around the room when they got home from the club—he hasn’t been to work in two days, can’t remember if he called Mai but he can’t remember _not_ calling her to her tell, what? His friend was kidnapped, except not really, and then his boyfriend was kidnapped, for real this time? He kicks Ryou’s ridiculously tight pants away from his bag and briefly debates hauling all of his biochemistry notebooks to Egypt with him before dumping it all on the carpet.

Malik finds him sitting on the carpet an indeterminate amount of time later, folding and unfolding the same sock for the umpteenth time. His friend slumps down next to him and presses his head against Bakura’s shoulder. “You better get your shit together before Seto sends one of his goons after us.” He chuckles. “Or worse, Mokuba.”

Bakura ultimately decides he’s not going to need socks in the fucking desert and tosses it. “Are you and Marik okay?”

Malik shrugs and leans into Bakura harder, the mooch. “We’re brothers,” he says by way of explanation.

Eventually, Malik manages to harangue Bakura into packing enough clothing to last a week and then back out into the kitchen. Bakura checks through his backpack one more time, makes sure he has everything. “So, what does Ishizu think she can do?” he finally asks, “Why go all the way to Egypt?”

Malik tosses the last of the trash into a bag and slings it over his shoulder to toss on their way out. He shrugs. “I’m not really sure. I remember hearing a bit about it when we were little, but Ishizu was talking about maybe using something called the Sennen Items?” He steps out before Bakura. “I don’t know much, to be honest.”

Bakura shuts the door behind him with a click, and for the first time in a long while, realizes he knows exactly what to do next. “I think I might know somewhere we can find out.”

-

Ryou watches his brother make tea from as far away as possible—which, by way of an incredibly awkward car ride and elevator trip up to the loft he and Bakura hadn’t managed to get into, he discovered had eventually unspooled to about twenty feet.

After the long silence, he’s startled when his brother speaks. “Would you stop looking at me like I’ve done this?”

Ryou scowls at his brother’s back as he pours boiling water into his mug and tries not to imagine bashing his head in with the kettle. “I still haven’t decided that you _haven’t_ done this.”

“That’s not for you to decide,” his brother tells him. “In fact, if your lovely friend hadn’t decided he wanted to jump your bones—pun intended—so badly he brought you to the mortal coil _incorrectly_ , I wouldn’t be having such a fantastic time explaining this to you while you make faces at me in my own kitchen.”

“Shut up!” Ryou snaps, face flushing. He crosses his arms over his chest and doubles down on the face he’s making, although now he makes it at the wall of windows that faces the cityscape below them. The frustrated, angry, tired, desperate face, for the record. “You don’t know a damn thing about Bakura, so shut the hell up.”

Ryou’s brother picks his tea up and settles against the marble counter separating the kitchen from the living room. “I’d watch your mouth, if I were you. It’s your temper that’s gotten you into all this trouble so far.”

Ryou doesn’t miss the sheet of ice that crackles across his brother’s cup and begins to rethink his approach. Nevertheless, his brother is insinuating something and it makes Ryou’s skin crawl. He’s cautious when he asks, “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that you’ve let your temper get away from you before, and always to catastrophic results, so I’m not sure why you expect it to work in your favor now. It’s such a shame,” his brother says as he leans against the counter, “because most notably, if you hadn’t gotten so unreasonably angry with me and decided to stay home that night, you may very well still be alive.”

“Unreasonably?” Ryou runs a hand through his bangs, paces straight through the coffee table, and tries very hard not to think about things like wearing off or fading or _vanishing again just like before and this time no one will know where you are and no one’s coming to help you and you thought the apartment was hell but now you’ll be here with him and you’ll watch him hurt people as they_ beg _for it—_ “You almost _killed_ a human being!”

“It was warranted.”

“Punching him in the face would have been _warranted_ ,” Ryou shouts, “not making the blood boil out of his veins!”

Ryou’s brother chuckles. “Well, you were ripped limb from limb and I did it anyway, so which one of us got the short end of that stick?” He fiddles with the string of the tea bag for a minute before adding, “I killed the man who did it, by the way.”

There’s suddenly a terrible ringing in his ears and Ryou’s neck aches. “W-What?”

“Mmhm.” His brother takes a sip of his tea and rests his elbows on the counter. “I hunted him down and gutted him with his own blade. It was all very dramatic and fulfilling.”

Ryou can hardly hear himself ask, “Who was it?”

“I hardly think it matters—”

_“Tell me!”_ Ryou takes a step toward his brother and the glass wall behind him splinters with a sharp crack.

His brother shoves off of the countertop and crosses around the side to appraise Ryou with a look that made the ghost’s wounds ache. “Or you’ll what? Pop your head off and toss it around the house? Have your hands rearrange my CD collection? You mistake me for someone who’s _scared_ of you, baby brother.” He clicks his tongue and looks over the ruined plate of glass. “I’ll have to have that replaced.”

Ryou presses his lips together tight and doesn’t say anything for a long time. Instead, he crosses over to what’s left of the wall and stares out at the city.

“I told Father that you were haunting the house, and he told me he didn’t care.”

Ryou crosses his arms over his chest again and digs his nails into his elbows. “Stop.”

“I tried telling Mother, too, but she was so busy planning for the new baby—”

“You’re _lying_. That’s all you’ve ever done, that’s all you ever do, you’re a _liar_!”

“Am I?” He picks up the phone, thumb over the dial button, and Ryou freezes. “Would you like me to invite Father over, so you can see for yourself? You stood right in front of him and he didn’t even recognize you.”

Ryou stares at his feet. “He was drunk.”

“Yes, he’s that more often these days, too.” His brother sighs. “You act as though you didn’t miss me, after all these years.”

“I didn’t!”

“Now who’s lying?”

“I didn’t!” Ryou insists. “I was the one who was trapped, and _you_ , you never came! You never came back for me, not once!” The kitchen faucet slams on, boiling water spewing from the tap and filling the kitchen with steam. “So no, I didn’t miss you, or your lying, o-or how _cruel_ you are—”

“I have never been cruel to anyone who didn’t ask me to be first.” Ryou remembers he didn’t miss the way his brother could turn a smile into a weapon, either, forgot how potent it was when it was turned on him. “You’re thinking about his friend, aren’t you?” his brother practically purrs. “Do you want me to tell you what we did, what he asked for? Are you going to take notes?”

Ryou snaps out of view and his brother sighs, waves a hand to shut off the faucet. “Kink-shamed by my own flesh and blood, can you imagine? And we used to be so close.”

-

“You’re aware you’re in the process of stealing university property?”

The muscles in Bakura’s shoulders tighten, and he takes a deep breath, in and out, through his nose. Doesn’t turn around. “Hello, Atem.”

He hears footsteps come closer until Atem is leaning against the filing cabinet next to the one Bakura was rifling through, having been certain the Egyptology department was completely empty before he snuck in. Atem crosses his arms across his chest and regards Bakura. “Bakura, why aren’t we friends?”

Bakura barks out a laugh. “Maybe because you fucking hate me?”

“I’m not sure why you think that.”

As much as he’d like to, Bakura doesn’t spare Atem a withering look. He keeps flipping through files. “I don’t know, you made it abundantly clear more than once.”

Still leaning, Atem rolls his shoulders over to face him. “I would like to think we both said things we didn’t mean.”

“Yeah,” Bakura mutters under his breath, “I seem to remember some declarations of love I’d like to take back.”

Atem flinches and draws back. “I certainly didn’t remember you being this cruel.”

“There’s a lot of shit you didn’t know about me.” Atem, for the first time and at the most inopportune moment, actually keeps his mouth shut and lets Bakura stew. Finally, Bakura reaches the end of the drawer and slams it shut, whirls on Atem. “Is there a point to this? _You’re_ the one who left.”

“Only because you did first,” Atem snaps right back.

Bakura doesn’t pull open the next drawer so much to keep searching as to not punch his ex in the face. They glare at each other across the scant five feet of space. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

“It means you can’t honestly have been dense enough to not realize Marik Ishtar was fucking _pining_ after you our entire senior year of high school.” The look Bakura gives him must be a real peach, because Atem presses a hand to his face and laughs for a solid minute. “Bakura, really.”

“I— _what?!_ ” Bakura nearly slams his fingers into the drawer, files forgotten. “How did—I mean, he’s not—” Bakura stops, croaks, “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Atem smiles, wry and weary. “Explain a lot?”

Bakura scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, hah, it does.”

He doesn’t say he’s sorry, but Atem must see something like it in his face, because he nods at the cabinets. “What were you looking for?”

“Something called the Sennen Items?” Atem arches an eyebrow, and Bakura scrambles for a reasonable excuse. “It’s just for a personal project?”

Atem hums a sort of response, tapping his fingers on his arm and processing. Finally, “You’ll want the Kul Elna massacre. I think it’s in the second drawer of that cabinet to your right, half this shit’s not digitized yet so it may take a bit of searching.”

Bakura knows that Atem knows that Bakura is full of shit and he’s letting it slide, so for once Bakura doesn’t repress the case of warm-and-fuzzies he occasionally still gets when he looks at Atem. “Thanks.”

“Sure thing.” Atem shrugs and makes for the door. “Just, be careful,” Bakura turns back around to look at him, makes eye contact with Atem just before he shuts the door, “with your _personal project_.”

-

“I cannot _believe_ ,” Bakura hisses to Ishizu as attendants take their bags and direct them to their seats, “that you’re dating a guy who owns his own fucking _plane_.”

Ishizu arches an eyebrow. “I’m not dating him for his plane.”

“No,” Marik drawls as he slips behind Bakura and heads for the back row, “I’m sure you’re dating him for his sparkling personality.”

The look on Ishizu’s face is both exasperated and thunderous, so Bakura throws up a placating hand and rushes after Marik before his sister cursed them both to an eternity of hard-to-reach itches or something equally insidious. Malik walks in with Mokuba on his arm and tosses them an apologetic glance when Mokuba yanks him down into the plush seats up front and pulls up a deck of cards. Bakura chuckles. “He’s a goner.”

Marik gives his twin a thumbs-up and returns the resulting finger that Malik waves his way. “Probably for the best. He’s been a bit clingy since—” Marik cuts himself off with a grimace.

“Yeah, imagine,” Bakura says, “it’s almost like his brother went missing for a couple of days because he was having an orgy with the friendly neighborhood Satanist.” He pokes Marik in the shoulder. “I can’t see why he would be clingy.”

Because they are two mature adults who can resolve disputes without resorting to bodily harm, Bakura and Marik absolutely do not engage in a full-fledged poking fight until the plane takes off and Ishizu shoots them a dirty look. Absolutely not.

Bakura peels off of Marik with a groan and flops into his seat. An attendant comes by with drinks and doesn’t say anything about their total inability to act civilized, which Bakura considers a refreshing trend after a day in Seto’s concentrated company. Next to him, Marik slides open the window shutter and watches the land fall away to the ocean below them. “So, how did seeing Atem again go?”

How exactly did it go? Bakura mulls it over. “Fine, I guess. We didn’t kill each other, he actually helped me find info on the Sennen Items, no one called the cops. I’d say it went pretty well.” He spins the aluminum tab on his soda can around for a minute and adds before taking a swallow, “Atem implied that you were so terribly in love with me back in high school, though. Which is ridiculous, right?”

“I was.” Marik fiddles with a bracelet and tactfully doesn’t make eye contact. “So terribly in love with you.”

Bakura chokes on his drink and splutters until Marik reaches over and thumps him on the back. Across the plane, Mokuba and Malik look up from their game for a moment. “No,” Bakura wheezes, “No, I did not.”

“Ah, well. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Marik, uh, that actually sounds like something that sort of ma—”

Marik shrugs. “I figure I waste enough of your time as just your friend, you know.”

Ouch, right in the fraternal feels. “Marik, you know that’s not true.”

Marik looks at him out of the corner of his eye and it almost hides his shit-eating grin. “Are you going to cry?”

“You asshole!” Bakura gives him a shove and finds himself trapped in a clingy and despicable hug for his trouble. “Oh, get off! Your goddamn hair’s gonna stick me in the eye, you trashbag!”

“Sometimes I wonder about you two,” says a voice on Bakura’s other side, and he twists around enough in Marik’s grip to see Rishid sit down opposite them, “and whether or not you’ve grown older since the age of twelve or just taller.”

It’s tricky business, but Bakura finally manages to escape Marik’s hold far enough to give him one last good shove. “Ishizu sent you back here to babysit us?”

Rishid shrugs. “Something like that.”

Bakura looks to the front of the plane, where Ishizu sits leaning against Seto, tracing something against the palm of his hand. “Resisting the urge to vomit by increased distance?”

The corners of Rishid’s lips tick up. “Something like that, too.”

Next to him, Marik yawns and Bakura can’t help but yawn, too. A quick glance out the window confirms they’re over the open ocean, and a similar glance at the digital clock above the cockpit door tells him they’re got another fourteen hours before they land. With a stretch that pops most of his vertebrae, Bakura settles into further into the couch—the _couch_ , on the _private plane_ , for fuck’s sake—and closes his eyes.

The next thing he knows, Marik is pressing the freezing gold of his bracelet to Bakura’s face and Bakura jolts awake hard enough to topple out of his seat. He presses a hand to his cold cheek, scowling at Marik and pointedly ignoring the way Rishid rolls his eyes. “Marik!”

Marik sticks his tongue out, but still helps him stand. “You looked so peaceful, I just had to ruin it.” But before Bakura can decide how he wants to exact his revenge, Marik points out the window. “We’re here.”

Bakura looks past his hand to see Cairo spread out beyond the airport, hazy in the midday sun—and past the city, three peaks poke up against the horizon. Even before he realizes what they are, something is ringing in his ears, crystalline and strong, and his vision fuzzes. Bakura stumbles against Marik and the ringing stops when he looks away from the window. “Are those—?”

Marik swaps a concerned look with Rishid. “The pyramids? Yeah.”

Ishizu, Seto, Mokuba, and Malik are waiting for them on the tarmac as an army of people handle the plane and their luggage. Ishizu’s eyes are on Bakura immediately, sharp and perceptive, but she asks Marik and Rishid instead. “Is he alright?”

Bakura answers for himself. “Fine, yeah. Just woozy.”

Ishizu’s frown doesn’t dampen. “The same thing happened to us as well, the first time we saw them.” Seto’s hand wraps around her shoulder and Ishizu leans into him. Seto Kaiba really was human under all that leather, who knew?

“Marik ate shit and nearly passed out on the tarmac when we first got here,” Malik chimes in, linking arms with Bakura. “It was hilarious.”

Marik smacks his sibling upside the head and deadpans, “Thank you, for exploiting my childhood trauma for personal amusement,” and ducks the punch Malik swings at him. Bakura ends up as an impromptu human shield between the two of them as they head into the airport proper and get herded into a limo that peels off toward their hotel with very little regard for mundane things like traffic laws and speed limits.

It isn’t until they’ve been led up to their adjoining sets of suites and Bakura decides he is never, ever going to talk shit about Seto Kaiba again, that he realizes he’s still not entirely sure what they were doing. Sticking his head into the neighboring room, he sees Malik obsessively buffing one of his necklaces on his shirt hem. “Hey, you’re not unpacking?”

Malik looks up at him and fastens the gold back around his neck, then checks that his earrings are secure. “No, I’m just going to take my backpack as it is.” Satisfied with his jewelry, he smiles at Bakura. “You can leave some of your stuff here if you don’t want to haul it around, but we won’t be back for a couple of days.”

Bakura lets himself be led into the sitting room that their rooms all shared, where the rest of the Ishtars and Kaibas are waiting. Ishizu, Marik, and Rishid are equally as bedecked as Malik is, in all of their traditional jewelry, and Bakura’s starting to feel a little underdressed. “Wait, what? Where are we going?”

“The actual dig site is another flight away,” Rishid tells him, “and we’re spending a couple of nights there before we return to Cairo.”

“Right. Of course.” Bakura can’t shake the feeling that everyone is handling him with kid gloves as they pile into the elevator to the lobby, but Bakura gets distracted making gagging noises with Malik and Marik when Ishizu leans up to kiss Seto goodbye while Rishid and Mokuba shake their heads. It isn’t until a car with the Museum of Cairo logo peels up to the front entrance with a squeal of brakes and skid marks that he remembers to be suspicious.

“Ms. Ishizu!” The driver leans into the backseat and smiles at them as they all settle in, Ishizu in the passenger seat with everyone else suffering for their sins in the backseat. “It’s been so long since you’re been on the ground! Where are you headed to?”

“Just to the airstrip, if you wouldn’t mind it,” Ishizu tells him, waving to Seto as he walked back into the hotel lobby. “We need to catch a flight to the site.”

Their car slides into traffic so quickly that the bottom of Bakura’s stomach drops out. “Oh?” their driver asks, “where’s that this time? The one south of Alexandria?”

“No.” Ishizu and her siblings all share a look and exchange startlingly neutral expressions in the rearview mirror even as they watch Bakura. “Kul Elna.”

Bakura asks, “Why are we going to the village where the massacre happened?” just as the cabbie turns to Ishizu again with, “Kul Elna? You coming down to visit your mother?”

The realization is horrible. Malik twines his fingers with Bakura’s and lets him squeeze his hand as he connects all the bloody, bloody dots. “Oh.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Bakura attempts to convince everyone he’s totally got this—by repeatedly sticking his foot in his mouth and almost dying. It’s not every day your past life tries to murder you.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _ah, convi, our neglected little bastard child....but we're back to it! there are only a few chapters left and these are sort of the interim ones before the fun starts back up, but they're a (frustrating, frustrating) blast to write._
> 
>  
> 
> **we have most of the next chapter written out as well (it's a bit of a short one, so), which is good because i'm actually headed back to the hospital in the morning. it's 80% less fun and 100% more needles than where i'm at currently, but it can't really be helped if i want to stay alive, so**
> 
>  
> 
> _oh, and because we've forgotten to mention it before, if you're interested in more of our shenanigans or just want to say hi, you can find us on tumblr[here](http://the-cursed-daughter.tumblr.com/)_

Bakura watches the tense lines of Marik’s back as the plane rumbles onto the landing strip. Rishid glances back at them. “You can just fly back with the plane, you know. No one expects you to be here.”

“That’s fine.” Marik smirks, eyes fixed on the people gathering as the plane trundles to a halt. “Ishizu wanted me to come. It’s been a few years. Besides,” he elbows Bakura in the ribs, “the prodigal grandson comes home. No one’s going to care about me for at least a day.”

The crowd’s grown to at least fifty people by the time they hop down onto the tarmac, and Bakura is suddenly very uncomfortable because as one, everyone _turns to stare at him_. He leans towards Ishizu. “Who _are_ these people?”

She smiles and points to each person in turn, “That’s your uncle, Atef, and next to him are his wife, Urbi, and your cousins, Ata, Atsu, and Panya. The men behind him are your grandfather, Abosi, his brother, Gahiji, his brother’s daughter, Bahiti, and her children, Garai and Akila. You’ve got some other relatives, but they’re out at a Cairo dig site at the moment.”

Bakura’s breath whistles out through his teeth and is it possible the desert just got hotter or is that just his brain making a break for it and oozing out his ears? “Oh no, yeah, that’s fine, I’ll just toss them right on up with all these other names I’ll totally remember.”

Rishid chuckles behind him, too amused and not helpful at all, “There’s really only one name you need to remember. You see that woman next to Abosi?”

Oh, Bakura can see her. “The one who looks like she wants to feed me to something with a lot of teeth?”

“Yes.” Rishid waves to the woman and she nods. “That would be your grandmother, Siti.”

“Fucking fantastic.”

Malik rests his chin on Bakura’s shoulder from behind and drums his fingers on Bakura hips, grinning. “Yeah, she’s a darling. But don’t worry, she’s not glaring at you.”

Bakura glances back at his friends. “Yeah?”

“Mmhm.” Marik moves around his siblings and takes a step toward the villagers. Someone in the crowd literally _hisses_. Marik looks over his shoulder, smirks. “It’s not you, dear, it’s me.”

A small woman shoves her way out of the crowd until she stands almost toe to toe with Marik. He towers over her, but Bakura can see his hands shaking. “Marik.”

“Nabirye.” Marik pauses, staring down at the ground between them, says something else, not in Japanese.

Bakura knows that word. He leans against Malik to whisper, “Mother? That’s your mom?”

There’s a tense silence for a long moment and Malik’s fingers dig into Bakura’s hips, and then their mother envelops Marik in a hug. He flinches, but lets Nabirye hug him, and then allows her to grab his hand and drag him over to his siblings, talking all the while. Bakura steps to the side to let the family have their time and jumps when someone speaks behind him. When he turns, Siti is next to him.

Bakura, because he is a grown-ass man, does not wish the desert sands would open up and swallow him whole.

“She says you look just like your father,” Atef tells him, appearing on his left. Siti speaks again, and Atef adds, “She means that in a good way. She always thought your father was handsome, if unworthy. And rude. And,” Siti’s just going to town with the adjectives, Bakura can tell, but Atef summarizes with, “and unpleasant.”

“Um, thanks?” Bakura shifts his weight from foot to foot. “You speak Japanese?”

“Ishizu’s work at the Domino Museum has led to an influx of Japanese researchers, so I thought it prudent to learn.” One of Siti’s bony fingers jabs her son in the ribs and she adds something. Atef grins. “And also, we hoped you would visit one day.”

“Oh.” Bakura clears his throat and tries not to fidget. “Well, here I am.”

Four children sucker themselves to his legs and cling as the rest of his family come over to give him a look-see. Abosi slings an arm around his son’s shoulder and the other around his wife’s waist, and Bakura realizes that his mother had looked just like his grandfather. Atef smiles again. “Yes, here you are.”

-

Without Malik and Marik flanking him at the table, Bakura imagines dinner would have transcended mere awkward to a plane of familial hell he’d only ever seen in feel-good holiday movies. Between Ishizu, Rishid, Marik, Malik, and Atef translating for him and nine incredibly rowdy Egyptians—and Nabirye, who sat on Marik’s other side and tried not to notice how uncomfortable she made her son— _and_ Siti, watching him from the head of the table, Bakura was starting to regret getting into Kaiba’s not-flying car in the first place. One of his cousins shouts something from the far side of room and Malik has to try three times to hear what he said before Siti raises a hand and everyone shuts up.

She gestures at Rishid to translate, “It’s good to have you all here. Both families here together.” Her eyes slide to Marik. The _mostly_ is implied so heavily she may as well have said it.

Someone mutters something under their breath and Bakura accidently gets kicked under the table in their stead. He jolts, and Siti’s eyes settle on him, so he looks at Rishid. “I was, um, under the impression that Kul Elna was, y’know, totally gone. That’s what it said in the document I got from the university.”

Super appropriate dinner table conversation. Bakura is the yardstick of human intelligence.

Rishid relays and Siti scowls. “That was written by the pharaoh’s scribes.” Even through a translator, Bakura gets the feeling she’s more than a little bitter. “When brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, heard what happened to their kin in Kul Elna, six of them took their families from their new villages and came home. They mourned. They rebuilt.” Siti smirks. “They got even.”

“And we’ve been here ever since,” Atef interrupts. “Your grandmother was a teenager when that junior archaeologist found us,” Bakura’s uncle winks at him. “In fact, she’s the one who met him first.”

Abosi arches an eyebrow at him son and makes some sort of comment. Siti’s expression is both exasperated and amused from across the table. Rishid coughs to hide a grin. “I’m not going to translate that.”

Siti rises from the table and crosses the room, smacks her husband on the head as she passes. The moment of humor passes when she looks at Bakura again, and he tries his damndest not to wilt under her gaze. She speaks, and Rishid translates, “You know then, also, about the Sennen Items.”

It’s not a question.

Bakura fumbles. “A bit. Only what I found in the university. They, uh, they were made from the villagers, right? Seven of them?” He takes the chilly silence as a solid _yes_. “Which, for the record,” he adds because he literally cannot stop talking to save his life, has to fill the awkward silence by apparently shoving his entire foot in his mouth, “was incredibly fucked up.”

Siti nods and maybe from a certain angle as her face catches the light she could be smiling, just a bit amused. “We have all but two,” his uncle translates for her, “the Puzzle and the Eye. The Puzzle was a gift given away many years ago to that junior archaeologist, before your mother and uncle were born.”

“And the Eye?”

Bakura’s grandmother smiles grimly. “The Eye?” Atef makes a face, but translates anyway. “She says, ‘We’ll get that back, soon enough. Things stolen always have a way of returning home.’”

Bakura thinks of Ryou and hopes that’s true.

-

“Why are you staring at my grandfather’s grave?”

Bakura had never realized how easy it was to move quietly in the sand and he jumps about a foot when Marik speaks behind him. Because he hasn’t got his sand legs or what-the-fuck-ever yet, Marik’s grip on his arm is the only thing that keeps him from eating dirt when he turns to snap at his friend. “A little warning?” Bakura ducks out from under the alcove entrance to the crypts and back into the desert heat, scowling and embarrassed. “Sorry. I couldn’t read the marker.”

Marik shrugs. “It’s fine, come on,” and he’s pulling Bakura further into the crypts, winding down stairways and corridors until he jerks them to a halt in front of a massive doorway. The room opens up before them; tombs in rows of six stretching further back into the earth.  He drags Bakura down to the one at the very end. “Here.”

“I—Wow.” Bakura shuffles awkwardly, runs a hand through his hair, stares down at the sandstone that has his mother’s name engraved on it in a language he can’t even read. “Is it bad that I don’t remember her face?”

Marik squeezes his shoulders. “No.” After a pause, he asks, “I can leave you alone for a minute, if you want?”

“No, it’s fine.” Bakura shrugs. “I don’t really remember her very well, I just thought that I should see it.” He smiles at his friend. “Thanks for showing me.”

Marik hums an answer under his breath and Bakura turns to follow him back to the surface, but instead Marik skirts the edge of Bakura’s mother’s coffin, digs his fingers into the crack between the lid and the base, and _shoves._

Bakura jumps back, torn between horrified and curious and vividly remembering everything he’d ever heard about ancient Egyptians cursing the unholy fuck out of people who disturbed their graves. “Marik that’s my mother what the _hell—_ ”

But Marik doesn’t seem to be listening, instead shoving his arm into the gap and _rummaging through Bakura’s mother’s bones, probably_ , before yanking his arm back and manhandling the lid shut. “I’m sure this isn’t how your grandmother would want you to have this,” he’s saying, and Bakura realizes that Marik has the Sennen Ring in his hand, holding it gingerly by the leather cord looped through it, “but then again they weren’t supposed to bury it with her either.” He throws Bakura an awkward look. “They didn’t know if you would ever come for it, and it’s passed from the eldest of each generation to the next.”

The gold is cool against his fingertips when Bakura takes it from Marik, and he traces his hand across the engraved eye, jostling the spikes and sending them ringing against their metal loops. “Does that mean Ishizu—?”

“Yeah.” Marik double-checks that the coffin is secure and leads their way out, heading for the surface. “You know that necklace she has, with the eye?”

“Oh.” Bakura slips the leather cord around his neck but he can’t keep his hands off the Ring, tracing the metal loop again and again, compulsive. “And Ishizu thinks that this thing can help me? Help Ryou?”

“Yeah.”

The sun is doubly irritating and the air seems hotter as they step back out. Bakura squints and curses the sun, again, for the hundredth time today. “Do you know how?”

Marik pauses. “No.”

Lovely. “Well, uh, thanks for robbing my mother’s grave for me,” Bakura mulls the words over as he says them, steeps in the sheer _weird_ of it all. Marik shrugs and bumps his shoulder with Bakura’s, and they wander aimlessly back toward the village. It isn’t until the fourth person they pass makes the same hand motion and hisses something under their breath that Bakura realizes the gesture is directed at them.

Or, more specifically, at Marik.

After another villager does it, Bakura asks, “What are they calling you?”

“Kin-killer.” Bakura doesn’t think his face is conveying appropriate levels of _fucking horrified_ because Marik just laughs and adds, “Really only the older folk, though. In case you haven’t noticed, filial piety is a big deal around here. Everyone knew our father was beating on our mother, but turns out patricide is still frowned upon.”

Bakura throws his hands up and groans, exasperated and uncomfortable, but keeps walking. The Ring bumps against his chest, a familiar weight already. “Well, you were like, nine, right? It’s not like you did it on purpose!”

Marik gives him a strange look in lieu of an answer, and Bakura decides to just stick a pin in this entire topic because he _really probably definitely_ just doesn’t want to know.

They run into Malik eventually, chatting amicably with some people in truly despicable khaki shorts, which quickly turns into their being sardined into a tiny car and motoring toward what, Bakura is told, is a new dig site. “We thought it was just a crack in the ground,” Malik tells him, practically sitting in Bakura’s lap, “and, I mean, it turns out it is. But, a crack in the ground that someone lived in about three thousand years ago, if the inscriptions on the outside are to be believed.” He leans back incrementally against Bakura and presses the Sennen Ring between them. A full body shudder shakes Malik.

Face full of Malik’s hair, Bakura cranes around to make some sort of room, actually considering murdering someone so he can get a real seat to himself like Marik up front. “Are you okay?”

Malik shuffles over and ends up with one leg stretched into the front seat, poking Marik’s thigh. “It’s the Ring, sorry. I haven’t really been up close to the Items before—Ishizu usually keeps hers put away.”

Bakura thinks of how gingerly Marik had handled it and wonders how wise it was to just sling it on around his neck. “Are you not supposed to touch them or something?” He kicks Marik’s seat out of spite.

Marik snakes his arm around to pinch Bakura’s bare leg. “You’re not supposed to touch it if it’s not yours,” he says, as Bakura yanks his leg back, “just like back in daycare.”

“They have powers,” Malik adds, shifting further away. “It feels really strange, like hands grabbing at you.”

The truck rumbles to a stop and Bakura has never been happier to scramble out of air-conditioning back into the oppressive heat. A dozen or so locals and a couple more khaki-ed archaeologists wave to them, standing around a literal hole in the ground, a couple of harnesses scattered in the sand around them. “What kind of powers?”

Malik scratches the back of his neck and looks anywhere except Bakura as they stumble down the ditch to the waiting dig crew. “So, you know how we always say Ishizu knows everything?”

Bakura stops so suddenly he almost topples into the hole as they finally approach it. “Malik Ishtar, are you fucking telling me Ishizu can see the future?”

“Well, _glimpse_ it, if we’re being specific.”

“Malik!” Everyone is looking at him, so Bakura lowers his voice. “What does the Ring do?”

Malik and Marik swap glances. Marik speaks. “We’re not entirely sure.”

“You’re not—” Bakura stops, takes a deep breath, decides that yelling at his idiot friends would have to wait until they weren’t in public, and/or for when it was acceptable to beat both their obnoxious heads in. He turns to catch the attention of the khaki-ed woman who appears to be in charge. “What are we doing here?”

From the look on her face, he’s supposed to know this already. “We’ve translated the inscriptions around the entrance, but now we need to start preliminary investigations into the crevice.”

Bakura nudges one of the harnesses with his feet. “So are we picking straws for who gets crammed down there or what?”

Her face is pained and Bakura can tell she’s having some sort of silent conversation with Marik and Malik over his shoulder. “I was under the impression you were here to observe.”

“Nah, I’ll give it a shot.” Aside from him, Marik, and Malik, the other locals are too tall and broad to fit, let alone any imaging equipment. “Baby’s first excavation.”

“Bakura,” Malik starts, “I don’t think that’s the best—” But Bakura’s already stepping into the harness and after a moment of reproachful silence, Malik sighs and helps him, tightening straps and making sure the rope is secure. He pulls the final loop through with perhaps more force than is strictly necessary. “You’re being an idiot.”

“I’m working the family business,” Bakura replies, even though it gets him smacked. Malik doesn’t, however, drag him back to the car or shove him to his death down into the pit. He just watches as the crew rigs Bakura up and translates when they instruct him to go down slowly and control his descent by hanging onto the sides.

Bakura’s first mistake is thinking that this was easier than he had thought it would be. The pit widens just beyond the lip so claustrophobia is a non-issue only a few seconds after Marik and Malik and the rest of the dig team vanish from view. The cool dark is a welcome relief from the baking heat and Bakura just hangs for a second, enjoying the novelty, before he swings toward the wall to catch at the rocky outcroppings to slow himself down. “It’s not too deep!” he calls up, waits for the echo of _deep deep deep deep_ to recede. “Probably like thirty feet!”

“Can you see the bottom?” the archaeologist calls down.

Bakura’s second mistake is not watching where the fuck he was going.

His foot catches the next ledge down and doesn’t stick, the rock crumbling under his heel like it was greased and there’s a whisper of movement and a hiss of air before the right side of Bakura’s face explodes in pain, his rope shreds, and he drops the last ten feet into the dirt.

 _“Ah!”_ He jerks back and cracks the back of his head into the stone under him, clutching shaky hands to his face. “Shit!”

“Bakura?” When he doesn’t respond, Malik appears in the entryway, a hazy shadow far above him. “Bakura! What happened?! We’re coming down!”

“No, no! Don’t—” The right side of his face is burning, the blood on his hands is already tacky where his fingers are touching his cheek, it’s getting in his _mouth_ , “Don’t come down here! There’s a trap! I got caught in a trap, it cut my face!”

Bakura hears Malik duck out of the entrance and shout to someone, before turning back down to him. “We’re sending someone down to get you, okay?”

“No, don’t! It’s dangerous—” Marik lands next to him with a soft thump, like he didn’t just drop thirty feet into a dark hole in the ground. Bakura makes an attempt at scowling before pain lances across his face. “Don’t you people _listen?_ ”

Marik shines the flashlight at him, pulling his bloody hands away. “Let me see that.” A minute of inspection, and he whistles, low and long. “That’s going to scar. You’ll be a real lady-killer, though you’re lucky it didn’t get you in the eye.” A rope drops in a heap next to them, and Marik starts to wind it through Bakura’s harness, yanking on it when it’s secure. “Head on up, I’ll be behind you.”

Bakura twists in the ropes. “Wait, there are still traps down there!”

“I’ll be fine!” Marik yells after him. It’s forty long seconds of hanging suspended and Bakura’s sure he’s not much help to the people pulling him up, what with being more concerned with the blood gushing from his face than finding his way back up the rock, and he scuttles as far away from the pit as he can the second hands appear to pull him to the surface. Bakura refuses to move any further until they haul Marik up, too, and his friend presses something into his hand. “That’s what got you, hooked to a slingshot.” He turns to Malik. “We’re not going to be able to get at whatever’s down there. It’s rigged to the eyeballs with more traps.”

The blade is wicked-looking, curved and sharp with a hilt of bone. There’s an inscription wrapped around the base, and Bakura traces it with his fingernail as someone helps him into the truck. “What does it say?”

Malik takes it from him and holds it up to the window as the trucks rumble back to the village. “Thief King.”

The driver chuckles and says something to Malik. Bakura tries to pick out words as Marik starts to clean off his face. “What was that?”

“Just a bit of village history,” Malik tells him, waiting for the villager to continue. “Apparently, there was someone who escaped the massacre at Kul Elna, because he was small and young and the pharaoh’s soldiers missed him. And so great was the hate in his heart that he made a deal with a snake god in the desert and made a name for himself robbing the tombs of the pharaohs and their kin. People started to call him the Thief King.” Bakura focuses on what Malik is saying, instead of the fact that that’s the third gauze pad Marik’s put to his face. Face wounds are supposed to bleed a lot, right? “Eventually, he summoned up an army of demons and laid siege to the palace, and he and the pharaoh’s son were locked into some sort of cataclysmic battle.”

They pull into the village, and someone must’ve phoned Ishizu, because she and his grandmother are already waiting by the gates. “Cataclysmic battle?” Bakura asks, hissing as the alcohol swab burns his face.

Malik relays his question. “Some young priest tried to intervene and caused a huge explosion of magic that killed them all, and doomed them to meet each other over and over again across endless reincarnations until the end of time.” He takes the knife from Bakura again, mindful of the blade. “This is kid handwriting, though, can’t be more than ten years old.” He chuckles. “What a little shit, calling himself the king.”

Ishizu pulls Bakura into the house while Siti reads Malik and Marik the riot act. Half of Bakura’s face is plastered with gauze and tape and he’s too tired and edgy to sit through one of Ishizu’s spectacular lectures—especially considering he now knows that she probably _literally saw it coming._

Ishizu doesn’t comment on his face. She frowns. “I see you have the Ring.”

Oh, right.

Bakura explicitly _doesn’t_ mention how he went about getting it, just settles for a noncommittal, “Yeah.”

Outside, Siti’s voice changes in pitch and her words get much shorter and probably less polite. Bakura figures they’ve reached the same point in their conversation outside. As she sits him down on the couch, Ishizu’s careful not to touch the Ring, keeping her hands on Bakura’s shoulders as she presses him down into the cushions. Even when she sits down next to him, she keeps her distance. “I hope at least Marik was respectful.”

What with his stellar record of filial piety. “Yeah, he was.”

“I’m glad you saw her,” Ishizu says, soft, like Bakura’s still going to bust to pieces over a woman who’s been dead nearly a decade.

Bakura’s too strung-out to be worried about being rude when he jumps topics completely. His hands run over the gold of the Ring like they’re glued there. He hasn’t been able to take his hands off of it. “So the Ring? It’s going to help me, right? Help Ryou?”

Ishizu’s fingers rest briefly on the necklace she’s worn since they landed in Kul Elna, the one Bakura now knows is a Sennen Item, her face carefully blank as she considers her words. “It should.”

“It _should?_ ” Bakura’s face is confined to one incredibly neutral expression so he doesn’t rip his cheek completely open and face Malik’s wrath, so he settles for getting to his feet and pacing like a mouse on meth instead. “Ishizu, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have _no idea_ what the fuck is going on! And yeah, I know, that’s my fault for not ever coming down here or picking up the phone but—” He takes a deep breath, considers calming down, continues to freak the fuck out anyway, “—but I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know what the hell all this means and look, the Ring’s a _nice_ piece of gold, and honestly sort of a _creepy_ piece of gold, and I’m assuming it’s oozing out the ass with magic because apparently _everyone_ is oozing out the ass with magic around here—but how is this supposed to work? How is this supposed to help?”

Ishizu, bless her extraordinary patience and blatant inability to take anyone’s shit, waits for him to suck in a couple of breaths and run a hand through his hair and sit back down again. She doesn’t even do that placating hand gesture that she knows drives Bakura up the wall. “Ryou’s brother is old magic. We’re older.”

“So this comes down to some sort of seniority pissing contest—”

Ishizu pinches his leg, hard. “Shut up. We’re older, we’re angrier, and that means, in the long and short of it, that there are ways we can work around him.” She glances out the door, at her brothers or at Siti, Bakura’s not sure. “The Ring isn’t like the other Items. It’s malleable, but it’s more malicious, and has a habit of twisting its owner’s wishes. We need to be careful and consult before we do anything rash.”

 _Like improperly summoning a dead kid to the physical world and letting him get hijacked by the first asshole to come around._ Bakura scowls. “Okay, I get it, slow and steady wins the race. Who are you consulting, though? I didn’t think there would be anyone who knows more about this than you.” He jerks a thumb at the doorway. “Or her.”

Ishizu bites her lip and in his hands, the Ring grows warm. “Not who, necessarily. What.”

-

Just when Bakura thinks he’s done with the cryptic lectures and near death experiences for at least the rest of the week, if not his life, Siti creeps up on him the next morning.

It’s his own fault, really, for being condemned to go sit outside while the Ishtars finished packing, because Bakura had taken to scowling something awful and his face was still oozing blood around the edges. There had been a brief concern the night before that the blade had been poisoned that Bakura only vaguely remembers, being doped out of his mind on poppy tea at the time.

But the next morning had come and he woke up not-dead, with all intentions to stay that way until his grandmother sits down next to him on the steps and he nearly jumps out of his skin.

He’d thought that spending more time in Egypt would help him brush up on the language, but instead he’s all the more confused when Siti speaks. He frowns. She frowns. Repeats herself. Frowns harder.

“Look,” Bakura makes a face around the gauze plastered to his cheek and immediately regrets it, “I’m sorry, but I really have no idea what you’re saying.”

Siti looks at something over his shoulder, and Nabirye sits down on his other side, because apparently the people of Kul Elna are trained to walk without being heard by anyone like fucking _ninjas_. “You’ll remember, she says.” She presses a couple figs into Bakura’s hand. “It’s your birthright, like the Ring.”

Bakura’s already stuffed a fig in his mouth and he hurries to chew. “The Ring? Wait, no, it’s just on loan to me so I can help a friend—”

Nabirye tells something to Siti, and they both rolls their eyes. Siti mutters something about Atef? Bakura thinks? Nabirye looks at him again, hands him another fig. “The Items were forged for the six priests and the pharaoh. When they were returned to us, we split them between the six families of the village, except one we had buried with the graves. The one that archaeologist has now. You’re the eldest of the children in your family. Technically, it _is_ yours.”

“Oh.” Bakura traces his finger down one of the prongs. “ _Oh_. I, um, that’s—thank you.”

He’s spared from the rest of this awkward bonding moment by Rishid, who also does him the favor of walking like a normal human being. “We’re ready to go.”

The plane idles right where it had dropped them off a few days before and the same four little cousins that had suckered themselves to Bakura when he’d arrived refuse to let him go now. He makes it through goodbyes with people whose names he’s (predictably) forgotten and they peel the children off him one by one until he can hug his grandfather and uncle goodbye without impediment.

Siti waits until the rest of her family has had their turn. She clasps his shoulders and says in slow, accented Japanese, “You’ll come back.”

“Yeah.” Bakura lets Rishid pull him up into the plane. “Yeah, I’ll try.”

Malik laughs. “No, that wasn’t a question. She was making a statement.”

“Oh.” Malik helps his sister climb on and Bakura watches his family through the window as the plane splutters to a start. “Of course it was a statement. There’s not really any arguing with her, is there?”

“You learned that faster than your father,” Ishizu tells him, smile wry. “I was little, but I still remember the fights they had. Neither of them could understand the other, but _gods_ , they were loud.”

The ground falls away under them. “She always reminds me of you,” Rishid says, “how you and Malik fought when you were little.”

For once, the comparison isn’t as painful as Bakura expected.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Ryou survives family time, Amane navigates a hostage situation, and their brother attempts a modicum of civility.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **as always, so very sorry for the delay. we work in a number of high-volume molecular labs and shit got very busy with both our professional and personal lives, but we will drag this thing to its bitter end (hopefully soon)**

When Ryou had been alive, he’d had a particular talent for giving his brother the cold shoulder.

Considering his brother tended to solve his problems violently, with magic, or with _violent_ magic, Ryou’d had ample opportunity to practice.

As Ryou mills around the living room, absently sticking his hands through various books on their shelves while his brother rummages through the fridge, Ryou finds that it’s a talent he’s retained even in death. _Like the plague_ is too mild for how he and his brother have been skirting each other, keeping to their respective corners of the house and interacting as little as possible. And the longer Ryou stays the less need there is to talk at all—the more the spell wears off the less real he feels; it’s an effort to _literally_ keep his feet on the ground. It’s why, when the door slams open of its own accord and his brother looks as surprised as he does, Ryou jumps in surprise and stays airborne.

Amane tears into the loft like a whirlwind, toeing off her shoes and tossing her coat on the hook. She appraises them both, asks, “What’s for dinner?”

Ryou’s brother closes the fridge with a snap. “Dinner?”

“Family dinner. The meal you eat at night.” Amane breezes over to the couch and collapses dramatically. “Dad’s at the museum for some boring presentation, so what’s for dinner?”

“You have family dinner,” Ryou mumbles, chest aching, watching them both like through frosted glass. “Of course you do.”

His brother and Amane glance up like they’d forgotten he was there—honestly, they probably did. Leaning against the table, Ryou’s brother rubs the back of his neck and scowls. “We’re not having any kind of dinner, I don’t have anything to cook.” He arches an eyebrow at Amane and points at Ryou. “I don’t exactly stock food for two, let alone three.”

The doorbell rings. The security monitor flickers focus on a delivery driver.  Amane grins. “I got take-away.”

Their brother groans and Ryou can’t help but feel a little bad. “Of course you did.”

-

Ryou gives up on dinner after the third time his hand flickers and he drops the fork through his lap onto the chair. It’s even worse when Amane tries to awkwardly pat his shoulder and her hand ends up halfway through his ribcage, and they all pick at their take-away in silence. Ryou catches Amane looking at him when he turns to look at his brother and his brother peeking at Amane when he thinks that they both aren’t looking, and they sit in an ouroboros of peripheral glances until Ryou meets his brother’s eye and says, “She looks like our mother, doesn’t she?”

Amane chokes on her noodles, face turning red and scrambling for her water. Their brother thumps her on the back, waits for her to down half the glass and suck in a deep breath before he answers. “She does.” He pauses. “She looked more like our father when she was younger, though.”

Ryou nods, not certain what to do now, where to steer this poorly thought out conversation. “Was Mum—I mean, did she—” He tips his head back, stares at the ceiling. “Was she upset?”

“She was _devastated_ .” His brother traces a finger around the rim of his cup, but his hands are shaking, rattling a thin jitter against the tabletop. Across from them both, Amane leans forward—Ryou can imagine she hasn’t heard much of this before, knows he wouldn’t have told her if it was him who had to live with it. “We hadn’t planned to move, originally.” He chuckles, ducks his head and grits his teeth and Ryou realizes he’s shaking with _rage_. “But life gets difficult, you see, when half your home becomes a graveyard that she couldn’t walk through. You want details, I’m sure, of how life went on after your dear departure, but I’m not the right person to ask. As it happens, when you and your dead brother share a face, your grieving mother has a very hard time looking you in the eye—”

Amane smacks her hands down on the table. “Brother, stop it. You’re being awful.”

He hums consideringly, glancing from the cup to his siblings and back again. “Am I? I’m sorry.” The chair scrapes as he stands. “I think I want some tea.”

Amane gets up from the table to help their brother with the tea and Ryou can hear the murmur of their rushed conversation. It’s English, he realizes after a moment—it’s only been about fifteen years, he’s a bit rusty—but he can pick out choice words over the hiss of the kettle.

Amane yanks open the cabinet and sets down the box of tea bags with more force than is strictly necessary. “—let him go—you’re being cruel and—”

Their brother scowls, but ruffles her hair as he reaches for the cups and it’s not _fair._ “I can’t exactly control—don’t know what that boy’s done—”

“You need—try and fix this—know more than me!”

Now it’s their brother’s turn to abuse the tea bags. He tosses them into the sink with a wet slap and shoots Amane a look. “I can get _rid_ of him, but that’s it.”

“Please don’t.” His siblings whip around to look at him and Ryou takes a deep, unnecessary breath. “I-I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Amane snaps, slapping the counter hard enough that tea sloshes over the rims of the cups. Their brother arches an eyebrow in silence. “He’s not!” she insists.

Ryou and his brother nod, startled and somewhat impressed, and then Ryou is left standing awkwardly while Amane juggles their tea cups over to the table and their brother starts throwing out the takeaway containers. Ryou stands there, leg halfway through the chair he’s hovering next to as life goes on around him and he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath he doesn’t need and tries to imagine himself as part of this family had everything been so terribly different.

Amane’s elbow catching the edge of where his arm should be snaps him out of it—he doesn’t feel it, not exactly, but when he opens his eyes his sister is frozen partway through setting down a cup in front of him. After a beat, the tension drains from her shoulders and she grins. “You probably don’t want any tea, do you?”

Ryou grins back like she pulled it out of him. “It’s not really a question of if I _want_ it or not, I’m afraid.”

Their brother reaches across the table—and does _everyone_ in this family have to move so goddamn quietly, they’re ruining Ryou’s monopoly on jump-scares—and takes Ryou’s cup to pour into his own. He arches an eyebrow. “You weren’t going to drink it, were you?”

It should’ve been sad, poignant, a dug-up reminder of his brother’s worst habit of stealing drinks from Ryou’s cup or food off his plate. But all Ryou can scrounge up is the dregs of brotherly irritation. He rolls his eyes at Amane. “He do that to you, too?”

Amane cackles in lieu of an answer and their brother looks terribly hassled, and Ryou only has a moment to indulge in the teasing and fun before Amane’s face shifts to another, craftier looks he recognizes all too well, and asks, “Can we watch a movie?”

Ryou and his brother both flinch and exchange startled looks. Ryou’s brother speaks a _long_ moment later, like he’s not sure he heard her right. “What?”

Amane shifts over to the edge of the couch armrest and kicks her feet up. “A movie. You know, a moving picture. Together. As siblings. With like, popcorn and shit.”

“Don’t say shit,” Ryou and his brother admonish at the same time, and swap another pair of surprised glances.

“Well?” They hesitate for a beat too long, and Amane takes that as a yes, takes up more of the couch and shuffles through the channels until she finds a documentary about penguins. Ryou follows his brother to the couch, takes what could be very loosely defined as a seat on the other side of his sister, only just hearing her and their brother bicker over whether a documentary actually counts as a movie over the ringing in his ears. It’s loud enough it drowns out what he’s sure must be a riveting discussion of feeding habits of a particularly flamboyant-looking sort of penguin and the room starts to tilt in on itself, knocks him off-center and—

And there’s a hand in his, solid and real for just long enough to slash through the haze. The narrator cuts through crystal clear (“The diet of the macaroni penguin consists of a variety of crustaceans, squid, and fish—”) and Ryou jolts, turns just enough to see Amane staring furiously at the screen, muttering something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like Latin and squeezing tight enough that Ryou’s fingers start to hurt. But he squeezes back and Amane pauses just long enough for a quicksilver smile and their brother, as far as Ryou can tell, pretends not to notice.

-

In the end, two back-to-back penguin features and a crash course in Duel Monsters (”Duel Monsters? No one’s played those in like ten years, damn!”—”Amane, language, for fuck’s sake!”) later, Ryou watches his siblings bicker all the way out the door. He can still hear Amane insisting all the way down the hall that she can just take the subway home, she’s not a toddler, it’s how she got here after all, but Ryou’s still replaying their brother putting his hand on her shoulder as he leads her out the door, turning to roll his eyes at Ryou and for a moment they were _brothers_ again. The door finally clicks shut behind them and the elevators dings open down the hall. Ryou entertains the idea of washing the cups in the sink for a brief moment of whim before remembering that he _can’t_ , and stalks over to the window to do the one thing he’s actually any good at these days—glaring out the window at the city below.

Behind him, the elevator dings again and ten, fifteen seconds later, the door clicks open.

Ryou turns away from the half-formed reflection in the glass of white hair and wide eyes to the squeal of sneakers on concrete, and hadn’t Amane been wearing boots? “Amane? Did you two forget something—”

And then, he’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _a shorter one, unfortunately, but the next chapter is already written and the one after has a decent amount of work on it. we just want to get a bit of a buffer going before posting_
> 
> _and as always, you can find us on tumblr with the same username_


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